Sne

PolIcIEs in the European Union are largely made
This book addresses a range of questions that are pertinent to this

hidden world, focusing on one EU member state, the Netherlands.
How many civil servants are actually involved in EU-related
activities? What do these civil servants do when they engage with
the EU? And how do they negotiate their dual roles as national civil
servants and participants in European networks?
This book thereby offers a unique and invaluable insight into the
activities of national civil servants in the EU, and uncovers some of
the secrets of this hidden world of EU governance.
The New Eurocrats
These questions are answered through a wide variety of sources

and research methods: a large-scale survey among Dutch civil
servants, interviews with civil servants who participate in EU policy
processes, and observations of meetings both in Brussels and
in The Hague. In addition, special attention is given to national
experts who are seconded to the European Commission by their
government.
GEUIJEN // T HART // PRINCEN // YESILKAGIT
by national civil servants who prepare, take and implement

decisions in Brussels as well as at home. Despite the important role
of national civil servants in EU governance, they form a hidden
world that has received little attention from both the media and
academics.
The New Eurocrats
National Civil Servants in EU Policy-making
KARIN GEUIJEN // PAUL T HART // SEBASTIAAN PRINCEN // KUTSAL YESILKAGIT
ISBN 978 90 5356 797 5

AMSTERDAM UNIVERSITY PRESS
WWW.AUP.NL
9 789053 567975
amst erdam uni versi t y press
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The New Eurocrats:

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The New Eurocrats

Karin Geuijen
Paul t Hart
Sebastiaan Princen
Kutsal Yesilkagit
Amsterdam University Press
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Cover design: Maedium, Utrecht

Layout: Het Steen Typografie, Maarssen
isbn 978 90 5356 797 5
nur 754
Karin Geuijen, Paul t Hart, Sebastiaan Princen, Kutsal Yesilkagit / Amsterdam University Press, 2008
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved
above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.
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CONTENTS
Tables and Figures 8

Acknowledgements 11
chapter one:
STUDYING EUROCRATS AT WORK 13
1.1
1.2
1.3
1.4
1.5
1.6
Emerging Eurocracy: National civil servants and European

integration 13
From diplomats to international experts 15
Tensions and dilemmas in diplomatic practice 21
Research questions 23
Methods 24
Book plan 27
chapter two:
TOWARD A EUROPEANISED CIVIL SERVICE?
A SURVEY STUDY 31
2.1
2.2
2.3
2.4
Surveying the Dutch civil service 31

Finding Dutch Eurocrats 33
The organisational context of Dutch Eurocracy 41
The virtuous spiral of organisational Europeanisation 48
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chapter three:
EUROCRATIC WORK AS STRATEGIC BEHAVIOUR: MOVING
BEFORE THE COMMISSION DOES IN VETERINARY POLICY 51
3.1
3.2
3.3
3.4
3.5
Representing the national interest in Brussels 51

Uploading in the pre-proposal phase 52
Research design 57
Frontloading, signalling and coalition formation in veterinary
policy 58
Eurocratic work as strategic behaviour: Conclusions 73
chapter four:
GETTING THINGS DONE IN EUROPEAN POLICE
CO-OPERATION 77
4.1
4.2
4.3
4.4
Eurocratic work in the Third Pillar: A different world? 77

The case of data availability: Messy policy-making in Europe 78
Species of Eurocrats 85
Understanding national Eurocrats: Conclusions 99
chapter five:
BRIDGE BUILDERS OR BRIDGEHEADS IN BRUSSELS?
THE WORLD OF SECONDED NATIONAL EXPERTS 103
5.1
5.2
5.3
5.4
5.5
5.6
5.7
Living and breathing the Brussels bureaucracy 103

Getting inside the insiders: Methodology and data 105
Demand and supply: The Dutch and the expert secondment
system 106
Profiling the Dutch expert contingent 111
Knowing how and knowing who: Networking 113
Life after secondment: SNEs and their careers 123
An underutilised asset: Conclusions 125
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chapter six:
UNDERSTANDING EUROCRATIC WORK:
CONCLUSIONS AND REFLECTIONS 129
6.1
6.2
6.3
6.4
6.5
Dutch Eurocracy revisited 129

Eurocrats: How many, where? 130
Eurocratic work: Individual professionalism 131
Eurocratic work: Organisational preconditions 140
Grasping the real world of Eurocracy: The road ahead 146
Appendix
151
Notes 153
Bibliography 161
About the authors
Index
173
171
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TABLES AND FIGURES
tables
Table 1.1
Two models of diplomatic representation
18
Table 2.1
Table 2.2
Table 2.3
Table 2.4
EU involvement among civil servants

EU involvement by job type
EU involvement by educational level
Time share of EU-related work among civil servants
whose work is affected by the EU
Importance of specific EU-related activities among
civil servants whose work is affected by the EU
Factor loading of the specific EU-related activities on
the two extracted components
Cross-table between Importance of participation in
Council Working Groups and Importance of
participation in Commission Working Groups
EU involvement, median time spent and dispersion
index by government organisation
Overall responses to the six statements
Responses to the six statements by respondents in the
three types of organisations
33
35
35
Table 2.5
Table 2.6
Table 2.7
Table 2.8
Table 2.9
Table 2.10
37
38
39
40
43
46
47
Table 4.1
Dutch Eurocrats: Three ideal types
100
Table 5.1
Table 5.2
Table 5.3
Table 5.4
Commission Directorate-Generals as SNE Receivers

Dutch ministries and agencies as SNE Providers
Ranks of Dutch SNEs at the time of secondment
Frequency of Dutch SNE contacts
108
110
112
115
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SNE return rate after secondment
Table 6.1 Strengths and weaknesses of Eurocratic ideal types
125
132
figures:
Figure 2.1. Time spent on EU-related activities by civil servants
whose work is affected by the EU
36
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The researchers would like to thank a number of people for their support
during the process of doing this study. First, we would like to thank the
Dutch Ministry of the Interior (BZK) for its financial support and the members of the supervisory group for their comments and suggestions during
our discussions in The Hague. We would like to extend our particular
thanks to Tanja Timmermans, who was our contact at the Ministry and
helped us contact the right people on several occasions, and to Daphne de
Groot, who took over this role during the final stages of the process.
We would like to thank Andr Dickmann for his generous offer to include a number of questions in the large-scale POMO survey that he coordinated for the Ministry of the Interior. Moreover, his expertise was of
great help in further developing the survey questions and analysing the
survey data. Melchior Bus opened doors to EU co-ordinators in various ministries to identify and contact potential participants for the expert meetings
we held. Commissioner Anita Hazenberg generously provided us with an
extensive briefing about who is who in the Dutch community of policemen
and policy bureaucrats working on European police co-operation. Guido
van Os offered much needed assistance in transcribing the expert meeting
discussions.
Drafts of some of the chapters of this report were commented on by
fellow scholars. In particular, we would like to thank Mirko Noordegraaf
(Utrecht University), Rod Rhodes (Australian National University), Dvora
Yanow (VU University of Amsterdam) and Jane Mansbridge (Harvard University) for useful feedback and advice.
Finally, our thanks go out to all those people who, either as interviewees
or as participants in the expert meetings, were willing to share their experiences and ideas with us. In particular, we would like to thank the people
who allowed us to shadow them in the hallways and meeting rooms of The
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Hague, Brussels and elsewhere as they went about their Eurocratic working days. These interviews and observation periods have been invaluable.
This study was conceived and conducted by the four of us. However, three
other individuals have made crucial contributions to parts of it. Our co-author on chapter 3 was Ellen Mastenbroek of Radboud University, Nijmegen.
And chapter 5 was written entirely by Semin Suvarierol of Utrecht University and Caspar van den Berg of Leiden University as a standalone project
which fitted into the overall framework of this study perfectly and its findings are therefore included in this book. We are grateful for their pivotal
contributions to this book.
Karin Geuijen, Paul t Hart, Sebastiaan Princen, Kutsal Yesilkagit
Utrecht and Canberra, November 2007
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CHAPTER 1
STUDYING EUROCRATS AT WORK

1.1 Emerging Eurocracy: National civil servants and European
integration
Civil servants from the various European Union (EU) member states are
among the most ubiquitous and important players in European governance. Within the formal EU structures, they are involved in a myriad of
Commission expert groups, Council working parties, and comitology
committees, as well as a range of advisory committees. In these various
groups and committees, their roles vary from preparing decisions and giving advice to approving proposals on behalf of their political superiors and
taking or implementing decisions. In addition, civil servants are active outside of these formal EU-related structures, either in independent networks
of officials and regulators or in ad hoc contacts with their counterparts in
other countries.
Together, these civil servants form a dense web of what Slaughter (2004)
has called government networks. In her study of government networks,
Slaughter showed the vast array of functions they perform in terms of exchanging information, co-ordinating the enforcement of regulations, and
harmonising national regulations when those regulations have effects
across borders. According to Slaughter, the rise of government networks is
indicative of a new world order, in which states no longer present themselves on the international scene as unitary actors, speaking and acting with
one voice, but rather as disaggregated states in which functionally specialised parts of government directly interact with their counterparts in
other countries.
Despite the importance of civil servants in international and EU governance, relatively little is known about who they are and what they do. National civil servants take centre stage in three strands of literature. The best
known of these strands is the literature on the national co-ordination of EU
policies (cf. Harmsen 1999; Kassim et al. 2000; Peters and Wright 2000).
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The central concern of these studies is how the domestic administrations of

EU member states co-ordinate internally in order to produce a national
position in Brussels. Given this specific concern, this literature pays less
attention to what civil servants actually do when they go to Brussels. Second,
a group focused on Scandinavian scholars has conducted a number of
surveys among domestic civil servants. Some of these surveys seek to
establish the importance of EU-related work within the civil service at
large (Egeberg and Trondal 1999; Lgreid et al. 2004), while others focus
more specifically on the role conceptions of civil servants who are active in
committees and working groups of the European Commission and the
Council of Ministers (Beyers 2005; Beyers and Trondal 2004; Egeberg
1999; Trondal 2002; Trondal and Veggeland 2003). Finally, a few isolated
studies have followed the activities of national civil servants in EU venues
firsthand through in-depth case studies and observation (Thedvall 2006;
2007).
These literatures offer parts of the picture, but overall they pale in comparison to the vast amounts of literature that analyse the more visible political aspects of EU policy-making, including the negotiations over major
treaty changes and the political processes that take place within and between the EUs institutions in formal decision-making. As part of these
processes, national civil servants sometimes pop up as the actors who prepare or implement a decision. Nevertheless, their role in the process tends
to remain a black box. National civil servants are part of the unseen hand
in European governance, which also comprises Commission officials, companies, lobbyists, and secretaries of the Council (Van Schendelen and Scully 2003).
In this book, we seek to open the black box and shed light on this hidden
world of EU governance by studying the role of national civil servants in EU
governance. We will call them national Eurocrats throughout this study.
We study them by systematically examining civil servants from one member state: the Netherlands.1 In doing so, we seek to add to and integrate
two of the studies mentioned above: the existing surveys among civil servants in Scandinavian countries, and the emerging literature on the activities of national civil servants in the EUs daily policy-making processes.
Through a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods,
we highlight the extent of civil servant involvement in processes of EU governance as well as the specific activities they perform and the roles they play
within these processes. We will use the remainder of this chapter to sketch
the theoretical background to this study, formulate more precisely the ques-
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tions to be answered, detail and justify the methods used to answer them,
and draw the outlines of the subsequent empirical chapters.
1.2 From diplomats to international experts

The wide involvement of national civil servants in EU policy-making
processes is indicative of a broader trend in the way the international representation of states is organised. In ideal-typical terms, it signifies a move
away from the classic model of diplomacy carried out by a unified diplomatic service. This model draws a clear line between international representation and other areas of government policy. International representation is conducted by professional diplomats, who claim to have the specific
expertise needed to deal with the diplomats of other states. Other civil servants deal with domestic affairs, and insofar as these domestic policies
have an international dimension, this external dimension is again the responsibility of professional diplomats. For example, in this model, environmental specialists develop domestic environmental policies, but diplomats
carry out negotiations on international environmental agreements. Moreover, the diplomatic service is highly formalised and hierarchical, with clear
channels of command and accountability. This allows governments to exert
a high degree of control over their external relations and to maintain a single voice toward other governments.
In the alternative model, which is exemplified by Slaughters analysis of
government networks, international relations are carried out by a multitude of civil servants, each of whom deal with their own area of expertise.
Not only do environmental civil servants develop domestic policies but they
also conduct international talks and negotiations on these topics. Taken to
its extreme, this implies the absence of a single chain of hierarchy in the
international field. There may be hierarchical relations within a policy area,
but there is no one overarching formal structure of hierarchical accountability and control in international affairs. Thus, in this model, governments dissolve in their constituent components and maintain a multitude
of (independent) ties with their counterparts in other governments.
This underlying shift in the form and organisation of diplomacy is important for understanding the background to and results of this study.
Therefore, we will first discuss in greater detail what the crucial assumptions are that underlie the two models and to what extent the shift from the
classic to the new model has been documented in the literature. This provides the background to the subsequent discussion of the tensions and
studying eurocrats at work
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dilemmas inherent in the practices of domestic civil servants in EU governance, which inform the central questions of this study.
Two models of international representation

The classic model of international diplomacy evolved from the 17th century
onwards and had three defining characteristics (cf. Coolsaet 1998: 3; see also Melissen 2006). First, diplomacy was considered to be a specific profession, apart from policy-specific or technical expertise. This premise was
derived from the notion that all the most important foreign policy decisions were essentially political, and that the skills required to handle them
were derived from intuition and experience (Hamilton and Langhorne
1995: 218). In terms of organising a countrys diplomatic service, this implied that diplomacy was meant to be a lifetime career, and that each diplomat had to enter the service at the lowest level (Kennan 1997: 200). Second,
diplomats operated within a centralised organisation led by a Ministry
of Foreign Affairs. This system allowed information from different sources
to be processed in one place, thus ensuring a consistent voice in the states
external relations. Third, the diplomatic model took bilateral relations between states as its foundation.
The classic model was built on a conception of the state as a single unit. A
diplomat was supposed to be speaking for the supreme source of power in
his own country (Kennan 1997: 204). Moreover, foreign policy and domestic policy were supposed to be completely separate. Foreign policy focused
on the double agenda of diplomacy for centuries: commercial issues and
security (Coolsaet 1998: 4). Insofar as international commitments impinged on domestic policies, it was assumed that some single coherent and
responsible centre of power [the supreme power in the quote above] () was
in a position to compel the countrys other authorities to play their part in
meeting any commitments made through the diplomatic process (Kennan
1997: 204).
The classic model in its pure form has always been subject to challenges
(Craig, George and Lauren 2006). In the literature, these challenges have
been explained with reference to two developments: the growing scope and
complexity of the international policy agenda and the rise of multilateralism. The growing international policy agenda has led to a tension between
the conception of diplomacy as a distinct, non-technical profession and the
need for specialised policy-specific knowledge to deal with issues of a highly
technical nature. This tension has run parallel with the blurring between
foreign policy and domestic policy. In the years between and directly after
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the two world wars, the main challenge to traditional diplomacy came from
economists, who were placed in embassies to deal with the growing importance of international economic policy co-ordination (Hamilton and Langhorne 1995: 169-170 and 203-204). Since then, the international agenda
has come to encompass a wide range of issues that in earlier times were
thought to be domestic in scope, such as environmental policy, social policy
and health policy. This has undermined one of the basic assumptions underlying the diplomatic model, that is, the separation between foreign and
domestic policy. Furthermore, it has led to a proliferation of direct contacts
between policy-specific departments in different countries, which Berridge
(2002: 15) has described as direct-dial diplomacy.
Other authors (e.g., Coolsaet 1998) identify the rise of multilateralism as
the driving force behind the rise of a new type of diplomat. Since multilateral forums typically deal with specific issues, countries tend to staff them
with specialists in those areas who, moreover, often report directly to a policy-specific department rather than the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Kennan
1997: 207). Nowhere is this trend clearer than in the EU, which has established a plethora of specific forums to deal with almost every conceivable
policy area.
This way of organising a countrys international representation can be
seen as a shift toward a new model of international representation. In its
purest form, this model has quite a different set of characteristics than the
classic model. To begin with, international representation is seen as an integral part of a policy area, and the main claim to professional knowledge is related to substantive technical expertise rather than diplomatic expertise. As
a result, a country is represented by environmental civil servants in talks and
negotiations on international environmental policies or by criminal justice
experts in international crime policies. Second, the governments external
representation is not organised in a single hierarchical system. There is no
single foreign office that co-ordinates all of the external relations. Rather,
governmental representatives report directly to their own department and
have little to do with representatives from other departments. Insofar as coordination among them takes place, this only occurs through the mechanisms that are available for domestic policy co-ordination, not through the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As Coolsaet (1998: 21) notes, this development
gives the current diplomatic structure and organisation a cobweb character,
without main threads as it seems. Finally, the new model is not primarily
based on bilateral diplomatic relations but on a combination of bilateral and
multilateral relations, in which the emphasis often lies on the latter.
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In terms of underlying assumptions, the new model of diplomacy also

stands diametrically opposed to the classic model. The state is not seen as
a single unit embodied by a supreme power, but as a collection of government agencies. In Slaughters words, the state has become a disaggregated state; disaggregated, that is, into its component institutions, which
maintain a multitude of ties with their counterparts in other countries
(Slaughter 2000: 178; 2004: 12-15). As a corollary, as was already explained
above, the new model in its pure form does not assume a distinction between foreign policy and domestic policy, but treats these as two components of a given policy area. An overview of the characteristics of and assumptions underlying the two models of diplomatic representation is
presented in table 1.1.
Classic model
New model
Role of diplomatic
professionalism
Diplomacy as a distinct
profession
Diplomacy as aspect of
policy-specific
professionalism
Organisation of
diplomatic service
Hierarchical in a
Ministry of Foreign
Affairs
Non-hierarchical,
reporting to specialised
departments
Main type of
diplomatic relations
Bilateral
Bilateral and multilateral
Nature of the state
Single unit with

sovereign power
Multitude of government
agencies with functional
specialisations
Distinction between
foreign policy and
domestic policy
Clear separation
between foreign and
domestic policy
No separation between
foreign and domestic
policy
Characteristics:
Assumptions:
Table 1.1 Two models of diplomatic representation
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Towards a new model of diplomacy?

These two models are extremes, ideal types, which in their pure form have
never existed in reality. Still, in recent decades the new model seems to have
become more important relative to the classic model, because of the widening scope of issues that are discussed at the international level and the increased levels of specialised knowledge that are required to deal with these
issues in international (often multilateral) forums.
These shifts have been widely documented in the literature on diplomacy
and international relations. For instance, Berridge (2002: 14) notes that it
is rare for [a Ministry of Foreign Affairs] now to have the same authority in
the conduct of foreign relations relative to other ministries that it once had
and in all states the line ministries trade, finance, defence, transport,
environment and so on () now engage in direct communication not only
with their foreign counterparts but also with quite different agencies
abroad. On a similar note, Hamilton and Langhorne (1995: 217) claim that
diplomatic inflation has tended () to modify the role of the professional
generalist. The pace of technological change, the speed of modern communications, and a heightened awareness of regional and global interdependence, have meant increased involvement in external affairs by domestic
ministries. For Coolsaet (1998: 18), the declining role of the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs as the central channel for diplomatic relations with other
states is a central characteristic of the way states have adapted to the rise of
multilateral forums.
It is more difficult to pinpoint the shift between the two models in quantitative terms, but some figures exist. In 1997, George Kennan (1997: 206)
estimated that approximately 70 % of all US diplomatic mission personnel
came from other departments and agencies than the US Department of
State. The relative importance of these departments and agencies also
varies over time. For instance, between 1986 and 1996, the number of
employees from the US Departments of Health, Justice and Transportation
in foreign US missions increased dramatically, while the number of the
US Agency for International Development, Department of Agriculture and
US Information Agency employees declined (Talbott 1997).
The most fertile ground for these new forms of diplomacy is the European Union both because its remit extends to a wide range of policy issues
and because it is the worlds strongest supranational organisation. Under
the aegis of the EU, thousands of national civil servants meet regularly in a
wide range of committees and working groups to discuss and decide on European policies and regulatory standards. The exact number of the Com-
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missions expert groups, comitology committees and the Councils working parties is difficult to assess, since some groups may be dormant while
others do not appear in official overviews. Wessels and Rometsch (1996:
331) estimate that approximately 25,000 national officials were involved in
Council and Commission working groups in 1994. Drawing on a Commission overview from 2004, Brandsma (2006) counted some 1,090 expert
groups, excluding subgroups and working groups within these expert
groups. Moreover, the number of Council working parties is estimated at
some 160, while the number of comitology committees, in which member
state representatives monitor the implementation of EU law by the European Commission, stands at approximately 320. Most of these groups are
typically attended by lower-ranking civil servants who are specialists in their
policy field or on a specific policy issue. In addition to departmental civil servants, these groups may also include representatives from independent
agencies in the member states.
The most systematic data on participation in EU policy-making by domestic civil servants can be found in surveys conducted in the Nordic countries. In a survey among officials from ministries and directorates in Norway, not even an EU member state, approximately 45% of respondents
(both in ministries and in directorates) indicated that they were affected to
some extent or more by the EU and/or the EEA Agreement (to which Norway is a party). In the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, this was as high as 61%
(Egeberg and Trondal 1999: 135). Although the impact does not imply that
an official is active within the EU, the figure does attest to the importance of
the EU for domestic civil servants.
In a survey among governmental units in Norway, Iceland, Sweden and
Finland (two EU members and two non-members), Lgreid et al. (2004) report figures concerning the perceived impact of the EU and the countries
contacts with EU institutions and their participation in EU committees.
The number of respondents who perceive the overall consequences of
EU/EEA policies and regulations on their department to be fairly large/
very large ranges between 31% (for Norway) and 64% (for Iceland), with
57% for both Sweden and Finland. In terms of actual contacts, their results
show that most of their contacts are with the Commission (a high of 43% of
respondents in Sweden), while participation in EU committees ranges
from between 7% (for comitology committees among Finnish respondents) and 26% (for Commission expert committees, again among Finnish
respondents). These figures probably overestimate the levels of contact
since the survey was conducted among the EU specialists of each govern-
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mental unit. Still, they indicate the wide range of officials within those
countries governments who are active in EU policy-making.
1.3 Tensions and dilemmas in diplomatic practice

Despite the rise of the new model of diplomacy, elements of both models
can be identified in the international representation of most states. The new
model presents itself most clearly in terms of the multitude of specialised
civil servants participating in working groups, expert groups and other
types of committees in the EU and other international organisations, as well
as in their direct links with counterparts in other countries.
The classic model is present in the attempts at co-ordinating the national
input in international forums. This is exemplified by the central co-ordinating role that Ministries of Foreign Affairs formally play in their states international policies (Hocking and Spence 2002). At embassies, the officials
from specialised departments operate under the aegis of an ambassador
who has most likely made the diplomatic services his or her career. These elements of formalisation and hierarchy based on the classic model serve to
guarantee at least some unity of voice in international arenas, predicated on
the idea that there is an overarching national interest which supersedes
the specific interests that may exist in the various policy areas.
This duality in international representation does create some tension.
Looked at from the classic model, parallel and non-hierarchical representation may easily lead to a lack of accountability, unwanted and unforeseen
commitments, and contradictory inputs that may weaken the overall effectiveness of a country in the international arena. Looked at from the viewpoint of the new model, formalisation and hierarchy lead to inflexibility and
a loss of expertise that, in turn, will undermine the effectiveness of the governments activities in international affairs.
This tension becomes most visible at the level of the individuals representing a government in an international forum or vis--vis their counterparts in another country. In the end, it is at the individual level that choices
are made and organisational arrangements are put into practice. Thus, a
central claim of our study is that a focus on individuals will help us to learn
more about the way the diplomatic representation of various governments
presently operates.
Moreover, new forms of diplomacy suffer from dilemmas that were also
present in the classic model of diplomacy but the classic model had at least
found some solutions for these dilemmas. To start with, the work of diplo-
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mats (in both models) is characterised by a great deal of discretion and autonomy. Diplomats typically operate in the international arena with relatively little direct control from hierarchical superiors (cf. Coolsaet 1998: 20).
There are three reasons for this. First, the work of diplomats often requires
specific expertise, which makes it difficult for others than the diplomat
properly to assess the processes and outcomes that take place in the international arena. Second, hierarchical superiors often concentrate their scarce
time and resources on a limited number of salient issues. Since expertisedriven international policy issues are normally not high on the domestic
administrative and political agenda, hierarchical superiors may take a fire
alarm approach to the work of diplomats, only interfering when problems
arise (cf. McCubbins and Schwartz 1984). Third, in their interaction with
colleagues from other states, diplomats form networks that they can use to
strengthen their position vis--vis their hierarchical superiors. In domestic
settings, they are able to point to an international consensus which they
can use to reinforce claims at home (cf. Haass analysis of epistemic communities; Haas 1989; 1992). Moreover, since decisions are made in international networks, the work of diplomats suffers from what scholars of public accountability have called the problem of the many hands, meaning
that many people contribute to a single outcome and individual contributions are difficult to distinguish; it is almost impossible to find one single
person responsible for any one outcome (Bovens 1998: 45-52).
In the classic diplomatic service, the tension between autonomy and control is mediated by a range of organisational instruments that are set in
place to establish accountability relationships between individual diplomats and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Diplomats receive instructions
and mandates from their Ministry of Foreign Affairs, while they are also required to report back to the Ministry on their activities, which allows the
Ministry to keep tabs on what diplomats are doing abroad. Moreover, diplomatic services exhibit a strong esprit de corps, nurtured by the organisational characteristics discussed above, such as diplomacy as a life-long career, the practice of diplomats entering the service at the lowest levels and
working their way up from there, as well as training programmes specifically designed for newly recruited diplomats. These unifying mechanisms are
much more difficult to establish for the heterogeneous and dispersed set of
civil servants that represent states in the new model of diplomacy. Therefore, an important question is how governments deal with the tension between the autonomy that is inherent in diplomatic work and their desire to
exert a degree of control over the people who represent them abroad.
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In addition to the tension between autonomy and control, both traditional and new diplomats have to deal with a range of dilemmas arising from
their positions as intermediaries between the domestic bureaucracy and
their international counterparts. These intermediary positions may expose
diplomats to opposite claims from the two sides as well as to conflicting
loyalties and different senses of belonging. In diplomatic services, one way
to prevent diplomats from going native is to establish a system of continuously changing jobs, in which diplomats typically spend only a few years at
one and the same foreign post and are assigned posts at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs itself every so many years so they stay in touch with their home
country. For non-professional diplomats, the situation may be somewhat
different, since they typically commute between their home department
and international forums. At the same time, this may result in new forms of
split loyalties, as civil servants continually have to move back and forth between their national and their European roles (Thedvall 2007).
1.4 Research questions

The current literature reveals three major gaps or weaknesses that will be
addressed in this book. First, there is little systematic knowledge about the
(quantitative) scale of the involvement of national civil servants in EU governance. How many civil servants are involved in these kinds of activities
and how important are these activities relative to traditional diplomacy?
What we know either rests on educated guesses based on numbers of forums or on the presence of foreign missions or officials from departments
other than the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Second, we have little insight
into the daily work practices of new diplomats. What do these officials do
when they interact with colleagues from other countries? How do they deal
with the tensions inherent in their positions as interlocutors between their
own department and their foreign peers? Third, little is known about how
national Eurocrats are embedded organisationally in their home departments. How much room do they have to manoeuvre, and how are they
organisationally facilitated (or constrained) in their work?
This book seeks to answers these questions by systematically studying
the EU-related activities of Dutch national civil servants. More specifically,
the three main questions we will answer are:
1. To what extent are Dutch civil servants involved in EU-related activities?
2. How do individual Dutch civil servants experience and practice the
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craft of policy-making for and in European arenas?

3. To what extent and how are these civil servants facilitated and constrained by existing ways of organising European affairs in their respective organisations?
The first two questions relate to the individual dimension of a civil servants
involvement in EU affairs. They involve the following key issues:
role orientations: what do national civil servants see as their chief tasks
and aims when participating in European policy processes?
activity and contact patterns: how much of their daily work is spent on
European matters, and how do they spend that time?
arenas and channels: where does European policy-making happen
for these civil servants?
formal and informal rules of the game: how does policy-making unfold
in these arenas?
effectiveness: what do Dutch civil servants consider a proper job when
operating on the European stage?
knowledge and expertise: what in their experience are the crucial competencies for national civil servants who operate on the European stage?
The third question pertains to the organisational dimension. Here we have
identified the following key issues:
personnel policies: how do organisations in Dutch central government
recruit officials for EU-related tasks and how do these EU-related activities fit into the career development of those officials?
organisational structures: how is EU-related work embedded within the
organisation and how do organisations facilitate this work?
co-ordination processes: how do organisations manage the EU-related
activities of civil servants in terms of instruction and guidance as well
as co-ordination between organisational units?2
1.5 Methods
The questions we seek to answer are multifaceted and include both quantitative and qualitative elements. Thus, in answering them we employed a
combination of research designs and data-gathering methods. This allowed
us to tap into several sources of potentially relevant information and to capture a wide range of perspectives on the pertinent issues.
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Population studies: Surveys

We commenced by conducting a large-scale survey among Dutch civil servants working in various departments of the national government. We had
the opportunity to incorporate a number of questions on EU-related activities into a large survey on job characteristics, job satisfaction and public sector motivation administered by the Dutch Ministry of the Interior (the socalled POMO survey). The survey was conducted in the first months of
2006 and was completed by 4,502 central government civil servants working (response rate of 45%). This survey allowed us to obtain a unique, quantitative assessment of the numbers and types of civil servants involved in
EU decision-making, the activities they are involved in, as well as their assessments of the organisational context within which they work.
In relation to the other methods employed in this study, the survey offers
an overview of overall patterns of involvement and activity among Dutch
civil servants. This allows us to assess the responses to the first major question involving the extent of civil servant involvement in EU-related activities.
Moreover, it allows us to obtain an overall, statistically-informed picture
of the perceptions of civil servants on their activities and the organisational
context within which they operate (our third question). The construction of
the questionnaire and selection of respondents will be discussed in greater
detail in chapter 2, along with the results of the survey.
Furthermore, the chapter on seconded national experts (SNEs) is based
on a specific survey among this group of civil servants seconded to the European Commission by the Dutch government. The sample of this survey covers the entire population of current (in 2006) Dutch SNEs and more than
half of all former Dutch SNEs seconded to the Commission.
Case studies: Documents, interviews, observations, and meetings of
experts
In addition to the surveys, we used a number of qualitative methods to gain
more insight into the actual activities and role perceptions of civil servants
in their daily routines. In order to get a more in-depth view and to be able to
use different methods in the same contexts, we focused the qualitative part
of our study on two cases: veterinary policy and police co-operation.
These two cases were chosen because they represent a useful set of commonalities and contrasts (i.e., they have characteristics such as most similar as well as most different cases when considering different clusters
of salient dimensions for comparison, see George and Bennett 2005). In
terms of commonalities, both cases involve more than one Dutch ministrys
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responsibilities, which enabled us to compare two different Dutch civil service organisations operating within one and the same European domain.
At the same time, the two cases sharply contrast in terms of the timing
and degree of Europeanisation of regulatory and policy activity. Veterinary
policy is a longstanding EU (and international) policy field, in which participants have been meeting regularly and for prolonged periods of time, and
which operates according to well-established and formalised operating procedures. Police co-operation, by contrast, is a relatively novel policy area
within the EU, which is in the development stages and operates under
much less fixed and formalised operating procedures. In institutional
terms, the two areas differ because veterinary policy forms part of the EUs
First Pillar, in which the Commission and the European Parliament play an
important role, while police co-operation is part of the Third Pillar, which relies much more on co-operation between member states with a weaker role
for the supranational EU institutions.
Although this limited comparison can obviously not aspire to the formation of a foundation of empirical generalisations, the contrast between the
two cases does enable us to shed some light on possible differences between
civil service work in more and less developed governance regimes in the
EU. At the European level, the issue in this context is whether Europeanised
civil service practices differ across the various governance regimes (the pillars) that the EU harbours. Within the Dutch civil service, the two cases allow us to analyse whether Dutch government organisations that have been
dealing with the EU for decades employ different work methods than those
whose involvement is more recent.
In order to capture the variety of activities and perspectives in each of the
two cases, we opted for a methodological triangulation approach that included three distinct methods. To begin with, we conducted structured, thematic interviews with 49 middle-ranking and top officials in the two policy
sectors. These officials worked for four different ministries, their associated
executive agencies and the Dutch Permanent Representation in the EU in
Brussels. We asked them about their experiences in doing European policy-making (and, to a lesser extent, policy implementation) in The Hague, in
Brussels, and anywhere else their jobs took them. The interviews were
recorded on tape and later transcribed. All interviewees agreed to be cited by
name, but we have generally refrained from doing so unless the quotations
were clearly recognisable as coming from a particular person. Likewise, interviews were conducted with 28 current and former SNEs in order to gain a
more nuanced and in-depth understanding of their activities and roles.
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Furthermore, we engaged in non-participant observation of the EU-related work routines of officials in different parts of the Dutch police, the
Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Agriculture,
Nature and Food Quality and the Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority. We attended a total of 16 meetings and/or visited relevant organisations to observe how EU-related activities take place and how the participants engage in those activities. We shadowed the officials involved as they
went about their jobs preparing for and participating in European meetings, mostly for one but sometimes for several full days. Shadowing
amounted to a mix of non-participant observation and seizing the opportunities offered by joint travel, breaks and lunches to have more informal discussions with both the people to be shadowed and the people they interacted with. This gave us the opportunity to understand the world of Dutch
Eurocrats as they themselves experienced it, at least more so than any other
of the research methods used were able to. Detailed notes were kept during
or immediately after the observation periods in order to document observations and impressions.
Finally, after completing all this and having drawn preliminary conclusions on the basis of the survey and the two case studies, we conducted five
expert meetings with middle-ranking and top-level officials from throughout the Dutch government, to check on the broader salience of these initial
findings. These meetings of experts were designed to further deepen our insights about what it means to be, and organise, national Eurocrats. A total
of 27 officials participated in these sessions, which lasted 2.5 hours each.
Each session was taped and transcribed.
1.6 Book plan

Having outlined the theoretical and methodological background of this
study, chapters 2 through 6 present the empirical results of this book. Chapter 2, which is co-authored by Ellen Mastenbroek, outlines the results of the
survey of 4,502 Dutch national government civil servants. It focuses both on
activities by individual civil servants and on the organisational context within which they operate. At the individual level, the chapter gives an overview
of the extent and forms of EU involvement in the Dutch civil service. At
the organisational level, the chapter looks at the position of EU-related activities within government organisations and the way these activities are
managed and facilitated. The survey allows us to sketch an overall picture of
EU activities and their organisational context that forms a useful back-
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ground for the more specific, in-depth analyses of the subsequent chapters.
Chapters 3 and 4 present the results of the two case studies we conducted
in the fields of veterinary policy and police co-operation, respectively. Chapter 3 focuses on veterinary policy. In their daily policy work, the actions of
Europeanised civil servants are to a large extent directed towards translating
their departments interests into EU policies. This chapter describes how
Dutch veterinary policy Eurocrats derive and upload their national preferences to the European policy process (Brzel 2002). Through extensive interviews with civil servants from the Ministry of Agriculture and subordinate agencies we were able to detect three alternative strategies that
Eurocrats from this department regularly employ: frontloading, signalling
and coalition formation.
Signalling consists of targeting Commission officials who are working
on a given policy dossier and conveying the preferences of the national government on that dossier. Frontloading moves one step further, as member
state civil servants try to become actively involved in preparing EU policy
proposals. Coalition formation is used to influence debates in committees
and working groups. This chapter will also show how these strategies are
employed and how the decisions for one or another strategy are made.
The chapter focuses on a phase within the EU policy process that has
hitherto received scant attention, but which is pivotal to any member state
for which the upload of its own preferences is a strategic priority. It zooms in
on one particular aspect of EU policy work: the manoeuvring that takes
place during the early stages of the policy-making process in First Pillar settings, e.g., when the Commission is considering formulating a proposal.
Secondly, we differ from the mainstream studies on uploading in that we
focus on the strategic behaviour of individual civil servants and ministries
instead of aggregated member states or European institutions (Scharpf
1997) whose parts may in fact harbour their own perceptions and pursue
their own interests.
In chapter 4, we study Dutch Eurocrats in the field of European police cooperation in order to understand the worlds they work in, and the ways in
which they define and do their work. We identify three quite distinct logics
of Eurocratic work, i.e., different ways of operating in different European
arenas. The first logic encompasses that of the bureaucrat-diplomats at the
ministries as well as in working groups and committees in Brussels who
bargain in the area of national positions. The second is that of street-level
entrepreneurs who build transnational coalitions of the willing as they are
confronted with transnational crime. The third and last logic of Eurocratic
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work is that of departmental co-ordinators focused on ensuring that the machinery of the domestic preparation of EU policy processes continues to
function smoothly. Because these three types of civil servants work via different European action channels, the demands imposed on them and the
way that their work is organisationally embedded and facilitated are very different.
Chapter 5, which is co-authored by Caspar van den Berg and Semin Suvarierol, looks at one specific type of national civil servant in the EU: seconded national experts (SNEs). The duality of national and European roles is
perhaps the most profound for them since they are practically torn between
two employers: their daily employer under whose supervision they work
(the Commission) and the national employer who sent them on the secondment and continues to pay their salaries (the member state). Other than
these atypical terms of employment, SNEs also form a particular group of
European civil servants in terms of their position at a crossing point of
European and national governance at the micro-level. This chapter asks if
SNEs build bridges between the Commission and the member state or
whether they act as national bridgeheads in the supranational Commission
arena through their (transnational) networks. This chapter addresses how
SNEs use their networks during and after their secondment and assesses
the extent to which the SNEs and the Dutch government benefit from the
secondment period in terms of exchange of information and career development.
Chapter 6 finally assembles the argument and formulates a number of
conclusions based on the books general themes.
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CHAPTER 2
TOWARD A EUROPEANISED CIVIL SERVICE?

A SURVEY STUDY
Co-author Ellen Mastenbroek
2.1 Surveying the Dutch civil service

Before we touch upon this books main objective to find out more about
how Dutch national bureaucrats do EU business we first have to answer
the obvious question: who are these people? How many officials in Dutch
national government do European business on a more than incidental basis? And which organisations within the Dutch public service do they tend
to work for? Perhaps surprisingly, this obvious question has never been answered before. On the individual level, we do not know how many Dutch
civil servants are involved in EU-related activities and what kinds of activities they are involved in. On the organisational level, the questions include
how EU-related activities are embedded in different parts of Dutch national
government and how EU-related work is managed and facilitated organisationally.
To address this deficiency, we conducted a large-scale survey among civil
servants working for organisations in Dutch national government. In doing
so, we were able to use data from a biennial civil servant personnel survey
that the Dutch Ministry of the Interior conducts. This so-called POMO survey included a range of questions concerning the jobs and careers of individual civil servants as well as their personal backgrounds. We included
four questions on EU-related activities in the questionnaire for the 2006
version of the POMO survey. These questions are reproduced (translated
from Dutch into English) in appendix I of this book.
In terms of population, the survey included all Dutch national government ministries, except the Ministry of Defence. Moreover, it also covered
four large semi-autonomous executive agencies: Tax Department, Public
Works and Water Management Agency, Immigration and Naturalisation
toward a europeanised civil service? a survey study
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Services, and Prison Services. From this group of some 90,000 civil servants, a random sample of 10,000 respondents was drawn. The survey
could be completed on paper or online. In the end, 4,502 civil servants responded, yielding a response rate of 45%.
The questions focused on producing an overall picture of EU involvement among civil servants as well as the organisational management of and
support for EU-related job activities. To get these results, respondents were
first asked to indicate if their work was affected by the EU. To emphasise the
effects of the EU on their work (rather than their organisation, policy sector
or policies in general), the question referred to a list of eight types of EU-related activities that we discerned. This list was deliberately broad, ranging
from participation in Commission expert groups or Council working parties to the transposition and enforcement of EU law and activities that involve taking into account EU law and policies when working on national
policies. In this way, an inclusive assessment could be made of the extent
and variety of EU-related activities within the Dutch national government.
After this preliminary filter, respondents were then asked to indicate how
important each of the eight types of activities were in their work, using a
five-point scale from totally unimportant to very important. Respondents
then had to indicate how many hours per week on average they spent on
these EU-related activities. This allowed us to assess not only the number of
civil servants working on EU-related activities but also the amount of time
spent on these activities.
Finally, respondents were presented with six statements on the way their
organisations managed and facilitated EU-related activities. Three of the
statements were related to issues of personnel management: training opportunities, the selection of personnel for EU-related activities, and
whether or not working on the EU is beneficial for ones career. The three
other statements related to the policy management of EU-related work: the
clarity of the mandate that civil servants receive when they go to EU meetings, the priority accorded to EU-related activities in the organisation, and
the co-ordination between policymakers and implementers when it comes
to EU policies. For each statement, respondents could indicate to what
degree they agreed on a five-point scale, from I do not agree at all to I totally agree.
What follows are the results of this survey, starting with the individual
level of EU involvement, and then proceeding to the organisational embeddedness and facilitation of those activities. On the basis of these results, we
can draw a number of overall conclusions about Dutch national Eurocrats,
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which form a general background to the more specific and detailed qualitative analyses of chapters 3 and 4.
2.2 Finding Dutch Eurocrats

How large does EU-related work loom in the daily existence of Dutch central government bureaucrats? How many of them can be called national
Eurocrats people for whom dealing with EU matters is part of their professional core business and for how many is the EU merely something peripheral to their jobs? The results of our survey allow us to answer these
questions for a broad group of civil servants in Dutch national government.
In this section, we will take a closer look at two elements of these results.
First, we will outline the overall levels of EU involvement among Dutch civil servants and the amount of time they spend on EU-related work. We will
then analyse the specific activities these civil servants perform and how
these activities relate to each other.
Incidental versus regular participants

An important measure of EU involvement is the proportion of respondents
who indicate that their work is affected by the EU. As is shown in table 2.1,
approximately 30% of respondents answered in the affirmative. We will refer to this 30% of respondents as civil servants whose work is affected by the
EU or who are involved in EU-related work. Most of the subsequent analyses are carried out solely within this group of respondents.
EU involvement
Frequency
Percent
Valid Percent
No
3066
68.1%
69.8%
Yes
1329
29.5%
30.2%
Valid total
4395
97.6%
100.0%
Missing
107
2.4%
Total
4502
100.0%
Table 2.1 EU involvement among civil servants (N=4502)
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It is difficult to say whether 30% is a high or a low figure, because comparable data for other countries are scarce. In a survey among Norwegian civil
servants, Egeberg and Trondal (1999) found that 45% of civil servants working at domestic ministries were affected to some extent or more by the EU,
compared to 44% at agencies and 61% at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.3
Likewise, an earlier study by Wessels (1997: 281) estimated that some 40%
of higher (i.e., policy-making) German civil servants were directly, i.e., by
their presence in Brussels, involved in one segment or other of EU policy
cycles as part of their everyday duties. In a comparative study covering four
Nordic countries, Lgreid et al. (2004) reported figures ranging from 31%
(Norway) to 57% (Finland and Sweden) and a high of 64% (Iceland) of respondents who thought that the overall consequences of the EU on their
policy area were fairly large or very large.
These figures are generally higher than the ones we found in our survey,
but in these other surveys, either the wording of the question or the sampling method differed from our study. When it comes to wording, Lgreid
et al. (2004) asked respondents whether EU policies and regulations affected their policy area, while we asked specifically about the respondents jobs.
In terms of samples, the Nordic surveys included either the EU specialists
of departmental units (Lgreid et al. 2004) or only officials in positions requiring a university degree (Egeberg and Trondal 1999). Wesselss estimate, which is not based on a formal survey, also refers to higher level civil
servants in the German government. This normally leads to higher figures
compared to our sample, which was drawn from all employees, including
support staff not directly involved in policy-related work.
We can increase the comparability of our figures with those reported by
Wessels and Egeberg and Trondal by distinguishing the types of jobs and
the educational levels completed by the respondents. Table 2.2 presents the
figures for EU involvement broken down by job type, which respondents
noted in another part of the POMO survey.
Table 2.2 shows that civil servants involved in policy preparation score highest when it comes to EU involvement at 47%, while those involved in secretarial and support jobs score below 20%. Overall, the figures for civil servants involved in policy-related jobs (policy preparation, oversight,
management and policy implementation) hover around the 40% that
was also noted by both Wessels and Egeberg and Trondal.
Table 2.3 presents EU involvement broken down by the level of education
completed by a respondent (also a question that was included in another
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Pagina 35
Involved in
EU-related work
Total number of
respondents
Percent
Frequency
Frequency
Policy preparation
47%
270
581
Oversight
43%
282
660
Management
37%
186
498
Research
35%
71
201
Policy implementation
30%
224
749
Secretariat
18%
49
275
Support
17%
144
829
Other
17%
92
558
Total
30%
1318
4351
Table 2.2 EU involvement by job type (N=4351)
part of the survey). This table shows a close association between educational level and EU involvement, with 46% of those holding university degrees
being involved in EU-related work. Again, this comes close to the figures
reported by both Wessels and Egeberg and Trondal, which suggests that the
levels of EU involvement found in the Dutch government is quite similar
to figures found in Norway and Germany in the 1990s.
Educational
Level
Involved in
EU-related work
Total number of
respondents
Percent
Frequency
Frequency
Primary and lower

vocational education
19%
44
237
General secondary
education
25%
297
1210
Intermediate and higher

vocational education
26%
473
1813
University degree
46%
506
1092
Total
30%
1320
4352
Table 2.3 EU involvement by educational level (N=4352)
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Being involved in EU-related work is one thing, spending time on EU-related activities is quite another. This point is illustrated by figure 2.1, which
shows the average weekly number of hours spent on EU-related activities by
respondents whose work was affected by the EU.
25.0%
20.0%
15.0%
10.0%
5.0%
0.0%
0
9 10 12 15 16 18 20 22 24 25 27 28 30 31 32 33 34 36 38 40
Figure 2.1 Time spent on EU-related activities by civil servants whose work is affected by the
EU (N=1244)
Within the group of civil servants whose work is affected by the EU, the vast
majority spends relatively little time on EU-related activities. A bit more
than half of all civil servants spend two hours or less a week on EU-related
activities, and almost 75% spend less than 10 hours. On the other side of the
spectrum, there are peaks at 30 hours, 36 hours and 40 hours. The latter two
presumably reflect a full working week for those respondents, making
them the true Eurocrats.4 In terms of all the respondents (including those
whose work is not affected by the EU), they comprise some 3% of the Dutch
civil services.
The mean time spent on EU-related activities among civil servants whose
work is affected by the EU is 7.81 hours per week. This figure is biased, how-
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ever, by the relatively small group of respondents who report a relatively

high number of hours. As a result, some 69% of civil servants in figure 2.1
spend less than the mean 7.81 hours a week on EU-related activities. An
alternative and arguably less misleading way of summarising the data is
therefore to look at the median time spent. For the 30% of respondents
whose work is affected by the EU, the median number of hours spent on the
EU is 2, which reflects the fact that an overwhelming number of these respondents spend relatively few hours on EU-related activities.
Since Dutch officials commonly work part-time, we have also looked at
the time spent on EU-related work by dividing the reported number of
hours by the contractual working week of each respondent. We then obtain
the time spent on EU-related activities relative to the total working week.
Table 2.4 shows the time shares of EU-related activities divided among four
classes, ranging from less than 25% to more than 75%.
Share of contract
time spent on EU
Frequency
Percentage of respondents whose

work is affected by the EU
Less than 25%
918
73.9%
25-50%
113
9.1%
50-75%
76
6.1%
More than 75%
135
10.9%
Total
1242
100%
Table 2.4 Time share of EU-related work among civil servants whose work is affected by the
EU (N=1242)
The majority of civil servants whose work is affected by the EU (73.9%)

spend less than 25% of their contract time on the EU, while 10.9% spend
more than 75% of their working week on EU-related activities. The categories between 25% and 75% together account for the remaining 15.2%.
These findings indicate that EU-related activities are dispersed among a
wide range of Europeanised civil servants, but that a small group spends,
relatively speaking, a lot of time on the EU.
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The EU participation ladder

In addition to EU involvement and the number of hours spent on EU-related activities, respondents were also asked to indicate how important eight
specific EU-related activities are in their work (see question 2 in appendix 1
for the complete description of each activity). Table 2.5 shows these eight
activities, ranking them in order of their importance to the work of the
respondents. Respondents could choose between five different responses,
ranging from totally unimportant to very important. In table 2.5, the fairly important and very important categories have been combined into an
important category, while the other three together form the unimportant
category.
EU-related activities
Important
Percents
Implementation
67%
Frequency
Unimportant
Percents
Total
Frequency
852
33%
417
1269
Taking into account EU policies
51%
640
49%
619
1259
Transposition
44%
555
56%
701
1256
Bilateral consultation
33%
420
67%
843
1263
Preparation of negotiations
33%
417
67%
853
1270
Commission working groups
25%
317
75%
940
1257
Involving local government
25%
309
75%
947
1256
Council working groups
17%
211
83%
1048
1259
Table 2.5 Importance of specific EU-related activities among civil servants whose work is
affected by the EU
Table 2.5 is topped by what we call top-down EU-related activities, such as

implementation, taking into account EU policies in domestic policy-making and the transposition of EU law into national law. These activities all relate to the impact of EU laws and policies on domestic laws and policies.
Bottom-up activities, which relate to the Dutch input into EU policy-making, rank much lower. Actual participation in Commission and Council
working groups is important for 25% and 17% of the respondents whose
work is affected by the EU, while both preparation of negotiations and bilateral consultations are important for approximately one-third of those respondents.
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A relevant follow-up question regards how these activities relate to each

other: do respondents specialise in one or several EU-related activities or is
there considerable overlap and do civil servants tend to do most of these activities at the same time? We can answer this question by doing a principal
component analysis of the eight activities. A principal component analysis
is a statistical technique that allows us to uncover clusters of activities that
tend to be performed together. If activities indeed belong to the same cluster, this may indicate that they represent a similar underlying type of activity.6
EU-related activities
Component
1
Dutch input into
EU policy-making
2
Implementation of
EU law and policies
Commission Working Groups
.930
Preparation of EU meetings
.920
Bilateral contacts
.878
Council Working Groups
.878
Involving local governments
.624
Taking into account EU policies
.498
.453
Transposition
.455
.581
Enforcement
.904
Table 2.6 Factor loading of specific EU-related activities on the two extracted components
(factor loading shown if they are greater than .4; the total explained variance is 73%).
Table 2.6 shows that the principal component analysis yields two such clusters (called components).7 The figures in the table show how strongly each
of the activities is correlated with these two components (the so-called factor loading of each activity). The closer a factor loading is to 1, the stronger
an activity is related to that component. Factor loadings have only been indicated if they are greater than .4.
The first component includes all specific activities except enforcement.
Bottom-up activities score highest on this component, while transposition
scores lower on this component than on the second. As this component
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refers mostly to the Dutch input into EU policy-making, we labelled it accordingly. The second component consists of enforcement, transposition
and taking into account EU policies when developing domestic policies,
although the latter activity scores higher on the first component. These are
activities that all relate to the top-down activities of implementing EU law
and policy.
Hence, civil servants tend to specialise to some degree in one of the two
types of activity. At the same time, component 1 shows that all specific activities, with the exception of enforcement, are clustered to a considerable
extent. Specialisation is therefore not absolute there is no sharp division
between the activities but is a matter of emphasis within a wider set of
activities.
A closer look at pairs of specific activities reveals that there is in fact a consistent pattern in the relations between them. Table 2.7 illustrates this well;
it shows the relationship between participation in both Council and Commission working groups.8 The columns show the percentages of respondents who find participation in Commission Working Groups unimportant
and important, respectively. The rows indicate how many respondents find
Participation in
Commission
Working Groups
Total
Unimportant Important
% within Council
Participation Unimportant Working Groups
in Council
Working
% within Commission
Groups
Working Groups
Important
% within Council
Working Groups
87.0%
13.0%
1039
96.7%
43.7%
14.8%
85.2%
210
Total
% within Commission
Working Groups
3.3%
57.0%
Count
935
314
1249
Table 2.7 Cross table between Importance of participation in Council Working Groups and
Importance of participation in Commission Working Groups, based on the dichotomous variables for each (N=1249)
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participation in Council Working Groups (un)important. The percentages

of % within Council Working Groups add up to 100% across rows, while
the percentages of % within Commission Working Groups add up across
columns.
The percentages in the table reveal that the association between the two activities is not symmetrical. The vast majority of those who find participation
in Council groups important also find participation in Commission groups
important (85%). However, a much smaller proportion of those who find
participation in Commission groups important also find participation in
Council groups important (57%).
As noted in table 2.5, participation in Council working groups is important for only 17% of all respondents, compared to 25% for whom participation in Commission working groups is important. The group of respondents for whom participation in Council working groups is important
therefore forms a subset of the larger group of respondents for whom participation in Commission working groups is important.
This pattern also holds for other pairs of specific activities, such as the
preparation of EU meetings and participation in Council and Commission
groups, or transposition and enforcement. It also holds for pairs of activities that belong to different components in table 2.6: 78% of respondents
for whom participation in Council working groups is important also find
enforcement important, but vice versa, only 20% of those for whom enforcement is important also find participation in Council working groups
important.
Therefore, table 2.5 presents a sort of overall participation ladder of
EU-related activities. Civil servants who are engaged in more specialised
activities (such as participation in Council working groups) are also engaged in more widespread activities (up to and including enforcement), but
not the other way around.
2.3 The organisational context of Dutch Eurocracy

Individual involvement and activities only tell part of the story of Dutch Eurocracy. Individual civil servants operate within an organisational context
that facilitates some and constrains other activities. In this section, we will
shed more light on this organisational context and the implications it has
for the work of individual civil servants.
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Organisational pockets or organisational cores?

The figures regarding the number of civil servants whose work is affected by
the EU (30%) and the average time they spend on EU-related activities are
not likely to be the same for all parts of the Dutch national government. Instead, we expect that some organisations will show much higher levels of
EU involvement than others. Moreover, apart from overall EU involvement
in an organisation, it is also important to look at the way EU-related work is
embedded within it. Is EU-related work the province of a small number of
specialists or is it spread across a wide range of civil servants? To assess this,
we constructed a dispersion index, which measures the extent to which the
time spent on EU-related activities is distributed evenly across all of the respondents whose work is affected by the EU.9 A value close to 0 indicates
that some people spend a lot of time on EU-related activities while others
spend little or no time on them. A value of 1, by contrast, indicates that all
civil servants spend the same amount of time on EU-related activities.
This measure is not dependent on the level of EU involvement in an organisation. For example, if two people in an organisation are involved in
EU-related work and they each spend one hour per week on the EU, the dispersion index will be 1. If, by contrast, five people spend 10 hours a week and
five others 30 hours, the index will be 0.8. Even if overall EU involvement is
higher in the latter organisation, the level of dispersion is lower because the
time spent on EU-related work is spread more unevenly.10
Table 2.8 shows, for all organisations included in our survey, the percentage of respondents which indicated that their work was affected by the EU,
the median time spent on EU-related activities by those respondents, and
the dispersion index among them.
Based on these figures, we can discern three types of organisation. The first
type, which we call Eurocratic bulwarks, consists of four organisations
where more than 50% of all civil servants are involved in EU-related work:
the Ministries of Agriculture; Foreign Affairs; Transport, Public Works and
Water Management; and Economic Affairs. The median time spent on EUrelated activities by respondents in these organisations is also above the
overall median of 2.0 hours (up to 8.0 hours in the Ministry of Agriculture).
In terms of dispersion, the differences are less pronounced, although all
four ministries score above the overall dispersion index score of 0.31. Again,
the Ministry of Agriculture has by far the highest score, indicating that the
time spent on EU-related activities is relatively evenly spread among civil
servants who work on EU-related matters.
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Organisation
Pagina 43
Involved in Median time

Dispersion
Number
EU-related spent on EU-re- index (among of responwork
lated activities civil servants dents
(among civil
affected by
servants affect- the EU)
ed by the EU)
Ministry of Agriculture
61%
8.0
0.47
276
Ministry of Foreign Affairs
56%
4.0
0.32
113
and Water Management
52%
3.0
0.35
111
Ministry of Economic Affairs
52%
4.0
0.34
115
Ministry of Social Affairs
38%
1.5
0.27
114
and the Environment
37%
2.0
0.31
167
Ministry of Finance
37%
4.0
0.33
100
Immigration Service
34%
2.0
0.22
101
Ministry of Health
33%
2.0
0.35
141
Tax Department
31%
4.0
0.34
1237
Ministry of Transport
Ministry of Housing
Public Works and Water

Management Directorate
31%
2.0
0.32
340
Ministry of the Interior
30%
2.0
0.25
86
Hoog College van Staat
25%
1.0
(0.49)
52
Ministry of Education
18%
2.0
0.38
116
Ministry of Justice
17%
1.0
0.16
687
Ministry of General Affairs
17%
1.0
(1.00)
12
Prison Services
11%
0.0
0.10
554
Other
39%
2.0
0.28
66
Total
30%
2.0
0.31
4388
Table 2.8 EU involvement, median time spent and dispersion index by government organisation (N=4388)
The second type may be called the Eurocratic runners-up. It consists of

organisations where between 30 and 40% of civil servants are involved in
EU-related work. The median number of hours spent on EU-related activities is 2.0 for most organisations in this group, but lower for the Ministry of
Social Affairs (1.5 hours) and higher for the Ministry of Finance and the Tax
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Service (4.0 hours).The dispersion index for organisations in this group

hovers around 0.30, which is the overall score across all civil servants in our
sample, with a low of 0.25 (Ministry of the Interior) and a high of 0.35 (Ministry of Health).
Finally, the third group consists of organisations that are much less involved with the EU and that we can therefore call national champions. In
each of these organisations, less than 30% of civil servants are involved in
any EU-related work, and the median number of hours spent on EU-related
activities is typically below the overall median of 2.0 hours. For the Ministry
of Justice and Prison Services, the dispersion index is also much lower, indicating that most EU-related activities are carried out by a small number of
EU-specialists. For other organisations, however, the picture is less clear.
For instance, only 18% of respondents in the Department of Education indicate that they are involved in EU-related work, but among them, the time
spent on EU-related activities is spread out relatively evenly.
The differences between organisations found in this study correspond
with those found by Egeberg and Trondal (1999) in Norway. The ministries
most affected by the EU in their study were Foreign Affairs, Economic Affairs and Transport, which conform to three of our four Eurocratic bulwarks. The Ministry of Agriculture is missing from the Norwegian list, but
this is presumably because Norway is not a member of the EU and therefore
does not participate in the EUs Common Agricultural Policy.
Our findings do differ, however, from those of Laffan and OMahoney
(2007) in Ireland. They also argue that Irelands central government consists of three circles of EU involvement, but identify different ministries.
Their Holy Trinity of most strongly Europeanised ministries are Foreign
Affairs, Finance and the Prime Ministers Office. The Ministry of Foreign
Affairs is the only one of these three that also appears among our European
top four. Laffan and OMahoneys second circle consists of an inner core of
ministries dealing with key EU areas, such as agriculture, justice, industry,
trade and employment, and the environment. Some of these ministries
(Agriculture, and Economic Affairs for both enterprises and trade) are in
our top category (with the Ministry of Agriculture almost forming a league
of its own), while justice-related organisations (the Ministry of Justice as
well as Immigration and Naturalisation Service and the Prison Services)
score relatively low in our study.15 Laffan and OMahoneys outer core consists of ministries that have very little to do with the EU and includes,
among others, the Ministry of Transportation, one of the top players in
both our and the Norwegian surveys.
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These striking differences between Laffan and OMahoney and our

study are probably largely the result of different methods used to establish
categorisations. Whereas our study relies on a survey among civil servants
in governmental organisations, Laffan and OMahoney make a qualitative
assessment of the relative prominence of certain government ministries in
EU affairs. Although prominence is an important issue in policy-making, it
arguably offers a less firm basis for assessing the overall impact of the EU
on governmental organisations. This, we argue, is better assessed by looking at actual activities.
Coming back to our own results, it is striking that the three indicators
for the degree of Europeanisation of organisations tend to go together: not
only do Eurocratic bulwarks have higher numbers of civil servants doing
EU-related work, but these civil servants also tend to devote more time to
EU-related activities and the time spent on these activities tends to be
spread more evenly across the civil servant population. With some exceptions, the opposite is true for the national champions in our sample. The
middle category of Eurocratic runners-up tends to fall inbetween on all
three indicators, however, with notable exceptions for some organisations
when it comes to the median number of hours spent and the level of dispersion.
Of course, the lines between the three categories are somewhat arbitrary,
in particular when it comes to differentiating between the Eurocratic runners-up and the national champions. What the figures do show, however,
is that there are substantial differences between organisations in terms of
how Europeanised they are and also the extent to which EU-related activities have become part of the organisational core. This three-fold distinction therefore offers a good starting point for the further analysis of the
organisational dynamics around EU-related work in Dutch national government, an issue we will turn to next.
Embedded Eurocratic work: Organisational support vs neglect

As we have seen above, organisations in one Dutch central government
differ in how central EU-related activities are to the work of their civil servants. We can expect that these differences will affect the way that EU matters are managed and facilitated organisationally. In order to test this
expectation, we have analysed the responses to the six statements on this
issue in our survey.
Table 2.9 shows the overall responses. The keywords refer to the six statements, the exact wording of which can be found in question 4 of appendix 1.
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Three of the statements related to personnel management (training opportunities, selection criteria for EU-related jobs, and career prospects for people working on the EU), while the other three covered issues of policy management (the clarity of mandates for EU meetings, the priority given to
EU-related work, and the co-ordination between policymakers and policy
implementers).
Statement
Training
Completely
disagree
8%
Largely
disagree
18%
Neither agree
nor disagree
27%
Largely
agree
35%
Completely N
agree
12%
810
Selection
9%
16%
43%
28%
4%
661
Career
15%
15%
32%
28%
10%
772
Mandate
11%
14%
44%
22%
9%
504
Priority
20%
32%
28%
14%
6%
802
Co-ordination
9%
19%
37%
27%
8%
668
Table 2.9 Overall responses to the six statements
These overall results show a mildly positive response to all of the statements, bearing in mind that the statement on priority was formulated in a
negative way so that disagree becomes a positive response. How, then, do
responses vary among survey participants?
On the individual level, we can look at the correlation between the responses to the six statements and the amount of time respondents spend on
EU-related activities. As it turns out, all of these correlations are negative,
ranging from -.3 to -.4, and are thus highly significant.16 Hence, the more respondents are involved in EU-related work, the less positive they are about
both personnel and policy management in their organisation. The only exception is the statement on priority because the more time respondents
spend on EU-related activities, the more positive they are about the priority
given to EU-related work. Still, overall, personnel and policy management
were judged most positively by respondents for whom EU-related work is
only a small part of their job.
This does not imply that organisations with relatively high levels of EU
involvement are also judged more negatively by their employees. Quite the
contrary, table 2.10 shows that respondents are generally more positive the
more Europeanised their organisations are. In table 2.10, we distinguish
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between the three types of organisation that we discussed above. For each
statement, the do not agree and do not agree at all categories have been
combined under the category disagree, while the original answers agree
and totally agree are combined under the agree category.
Statement
Type of organisation
Disagree
Neutral
Agree
Training
National champions
37%
21%
42%
83
Eurocratic runners-up
25%
28%
47%
465
Eurocratic bulwarks
24%
28%
48%
260
Selection
Career
Mandate
Priority
Co-ordination
National champions
33%
31%
36%
64
25%
47%
28%
374
Eurocratic bulwarks
24%
39%
38%
221
National champions
38%
23%
38%
73
33%
35%
32%
449
Eurocratic bulwarks
25%
29%
46%
248
National champions
26%
38%
36%
47
27%
50%
23%
279
Eurocratic bulwarks
22%
36%
42%
176
National champions
39%
34%
27%
82
49%
30%
21%
454
Eurocratic bulwarks
62%
24%
14%
264
National champions
31%
36%
34%
59
28%
42%
30%
386
Eurocratic bulwarks
28%
37%
43%
221
Table 2.10 Responses to the six statements by respondents in the three types of organisations
The statement on training does not reveal any major differences, although
respondents from national champions tend to agree a bit less often than respondents in Eurocratic runners-up and Eurocratic bulwarks. For the other
five statements, respondents in Eurocratic bulwarks are consistently more
positive than respondents in the other two types of organisation, again bearing in mind that disagree is a positive answer when it comes to the statement on the priority given to EU-related work. The negative responses
(disagree for most statements, and agree for the statement on priority),
show the same pattern, but with smaller differences.
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Although Eurocratic bulwarks score consistently higher than the other

types of organisation, this is not true for Eurocratic runners-up vis--vis national champions. In fact, for the statements on selection, career prospects,
mandates and co-ordination, national champions score higher levels of
positive responses than the Eurocratic runners-up.17 Meanwhile, in the
negative response categories, by contrast, the differences are more consistent, with Eurocratic runners-up scoring higher than national champions.
These results suggest that the core division between organisations in the
Dutch central government is between highly Europeanised Eurocratic
bulwarks and the rest. In Eurocratic bulwarks, two of the statements on
personnel management (those relating to selection and career prospects,
respectively) were responded to more positively, as were all of the statements regarding policy management. The fact that respondents who spend
more time on the EU tend to be more critical may reflect the fact that the
management of EU-related work is more important to them than it is to people who are only tangentially involved in EU-related activities. This tendency at the individual level notwithstanding, the analysis shows that respondents become more positive when their organisation reaches a certain
threshold of Europeanisation. This is another indication that EU-related
work in those organisations has moved from the periphery to the core of
what the organisation is doing.
2.4 The virtuous spiral of organisational Europeanisation

The data from our survey support two major conclusions. In terms of individual involvement in EU-related work, some 30% of respondents indicate
that their work is affected by the EU. Within this category, however, the vast
majority of civil servants spend relatively little time on EU-related activities.
As a result, EU-related work seems to remain somewhat of a specialised activity in the Dutch national government. Besides a relatively broad group of
civil servants for whom the EU is only of peripheral concern, there is a
smaller group of civil servants who spend all or most of their time on the EU.
The group inbetween is relatively small by comparison. In that sense, EUrelated work remains the domain of pockets of specialists within the Dutch
national government.
At the same time, these overall figures obscure important variations on
the organisational level. In some organisations, more than half of all civil
servants are involved in EU-related work, whereas in other organisations
this figure is 20% or less. Furthermore, higher levels of EU involvement
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tend to correlate with both higher median numbers of hours spent on EUrelated activities and a wider dispersion of EU-related work among civil servants. Therefore, EU-related work on all counts tends to be much closer to
the core of what organisations are doing when the work of more people in
these organisations is affected by the EU.
These differences are also reflected in the way organisations manage and
facilitate EU-related work. Respondents in organisations with high levels of
EU involvement are more positive about the way EU-related activities are integrated in personnel management as well as the way EU policy processes
are managed.
Overall, then, our findings suggest that there is a virtuous spiral of Europeanisation in Dutch central government organisations: the more civil servants are involved in EU-related work, the better it is managed and facilitated. This, one may assume, will in turn lead to a greater awareness of EUrelated activities within the organisation and hence greater EU involvement. The findings also suggest that there may be a critical threshold for this
effect to occur. Our data show small differences between moderately and
weakly Europeanised organisations, but a strong difference between highly
Europeanised organisations (which we called Eurocratic bulwarks) and
the rest. In our survey, the threshold lies at approximately 50% of civil servants being involved in EU-related work. This specific figure may be a result
of characteristics of the Dutch national government or of the organisations
that were included in our survey. In general, however, this type of threshold
effect may well be present in other EU-member states and other parts of
government as well.
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CHAPTER 3
EUROCRATIC WORK AS STRATEGIC BEHAVIOUR: MOVING BEFORE THE COMMISSION

DOES IN VETERINARY POLICY
3.1 Representing the national interest in Brussels
The senior echelons of the various departments that national Eurocrats
work for expect them to make sure their departments view of the world is
successfully presented when EU policies are being created (or implemented). To do this job well, Eurocrats need to know about the plans and intentions of their Directorate-General at the European Commission early on in
the policy process. Furthermore, they need to be able to sense where the
Commission is heading with a particular proposal; assess the implications
for their department in terms of costs and benefits for the domestic policy
status quo; discuss these plans with their colleagues in other units within
their own department or with colleagues with related or affected portfolios
in other departments; involve external experts and write reports; and finally,
determine their departments position with regard to the specific policy
issue at hand. Their socialisation on the job and their work routines are
geared towards performing these tasks.
The literature on Europeanisation abounds with big picture studies of
the politics of the European public policy-making process (Wessels and
Rometsch 1996; Scharpf 2001; Green-Cowles et al 2001; Featherstone and
Radaelli 2003), but there is surprisingly little research on the behaviour of
the countless individual officials that lie at the core of the process (Thedvall
2006; Larue 2006). This chapter takes the latter view. It examines how individual Dutch civil servants practice public policy-making for and within
European arenas. By employing this focus, we aim to shed a different light
on the question of where European policy-making happens and how in
our case, Dutch civil servants make it happen.
We will, however, look beyond just the practices of individual Eurocrats.
eurocratic work as strategic behaviour
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The strategic interaction with other Eurocrats is part and parcel of a civil servants work, which includes colleagues from other member countries, their
superiors at their home departments, and the officials of the Commission
and the Secretariat of the Council. Getting things done in Europe entails a
strategic effort to produce timely, coherent and sensible national policy positions, and to build support for these at the European level. Thus, the work
of most individual Eurocrats is embedded in two arenas of strategic interaction: departmental and interdepartmental preparation and the co-ordination arenas at the national level; and Commission and Council Secretariat
counterparts and arenas at the European level. Hence we examine the work
of departmental Eurocrats in terms of strategic manoeuvring within and
between those arenas. We look at how they are instructed and guided by
their superiors, how they give and receive feedback and how they are held
accountable for and render account for their actions.
We are not concerned with covering the role and various behaviour
patterns of Eurocrats during the full policy cycle. Our focus is limited to a
specific phase therein, i.e., the pre-proposal phase, which we will elaborate
upon below. This chapter is therefore situated within the broader category
of uploading studies (Brzel 2002), e.g., the process of advocating departmental preferences, transforming these into national positions, and introducing these at the various EU levels during the policy development phase.
Obviously, policy development in the real world does not stop at this particular stage, and the politics of policy formulation continues into the implementation phase. Once a policy package has arrived at the comitology stage,
the representatives of member states within the management boards of the
committees will continue to bend and shape the process and output of the
policies agreed upon to fit these into their national preferences (Brandsma
2006).
3.2 Uploading in the pre-proposal phase

Uploading is defined here as the actions undertaken on behalf of member
states to ensure that as much of the legislative output of the EU as possible
produces policies that are in line with pre-existing national policies and/or
national policy preferences. Uploading can be considered a process of competition between member states (Hritier et al. 1996; Eising and KohlerKoch 1999). Successful uploads of national preferences will reduce adaptation costs when adopted policies are downloaded once they have been
enacted at the European level. It will further reduce costs of transposition in
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pure legislative-administrative terms as well as the political transaction

costs that accompany legislative bargaining (Steunenberg 2006; Mastenbroek 2007). Successful uploading will also reduce uncertainty and the
costs of adaptation for the affected industry at home (Haverland 2000). Finally, as Brzel points out, successful uploading can relieve the domestic
political elites of the social problems they are unable to tackle at the domestic level, such as immigration and organised crime (Brzel 2002).
Uploading studies come in various guises. We distinguish between two
different streams.18 One entails game-theoretic studies which depict European bargaining as connected or nested games. The hallmark of these
games is that the same actors are involved in a whole network of games,
with the outcome of one game having consequences for the start of another
game. Thus actors play multiple games simultaneously or sequentially.
They are thus continuously contemplating not only the strategies of the
other actors involved and the outcomes of current games but also the actor
strategies and outcomes of games that follow or occur at the same time as
the current game (Tsebelis 1990; Putnam 1988; Mayer 1992). Relationships between the EU and member states have often been modelled as twoor even three-level (subnational, national and European) games (Pahre
1997; Payne 2000). A second strand of uploading literature includes studies of the national and supranational co-ordination of EU policies which
focus, respectively, on the co-ordination of member states national positions at home through what Schneider and Baltz (2005) have dubbed as
Byzantine co-ordination structures, and on how member states formal
representatives at Brussels lobby for the adoption of these national positions in Brussels. In these works, member state adaptation to and shaping
of European policies are being studied chiefly through the lens of formal
co-ordination arrangements, e.g. interdepartmental working groups, Permanent Representative offices and the manifold EU-level groups and committees (Harmsen 1999; Kassim et al. 2000; Kassim et al. 2001; Peters and
Wright 2000).
This part of our study differs from these predecessors in two important
respects. The first is that we focus on the pre-proposal phase. This phase has
hitherto received scant attention in EU studies, but offers crucial opportunities to any self-interested member state seeking to upload its preferences.
The pre-proposal phase entails the manoeuvring that takes place during the
early stages of the policy-making process in First Pillar settings, when the
Commission is considering formulating a proposal. At this stage of the policy process, the Commission has the exclusive right to set the agenda,
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launch new policy ideas, and draft and submit proposals to the Council and
European Parliament. National governments have strong incentives to
monitor the Commission services so that when the early signs of action are
detected the interested departments at home can be alerted and begin to
take steps to decide a policy (Kassim 2001: 16). Remarkably, however, there
is scant attention within the academic literature to the strategies member
state governments employ during the proposal formation (or pre-proposal)
stage. The majority of studies on the European policy process focus on the
formal structures of national position co-ordination after the Commission
has launched its position (Kassim et al. 2001, 2003) or deal exclusively with
the decision-making process at the supranational level (Eberlein and Kerwer 2004; Thomson et al. 2006).
Secondly, our study of pre-proposal phase uploading is unique in that we
focus on the strategic behaviour of individual civil servants and ministries.
Existing studies focus on member states or European institutions as aggregate actors, examining their strategies. Although, for example, Brzel
(2002) acknowledges that the uploading strategies (which she labelled as
pace-setting, foot-dragging, and fence-sitting) may vary from policy sector to policy sector, her model addresses the strategy choices of member
states at an aggregate level. One notable exception is the work of Schneider
and Baltz (2005). They examine the discretionary powers of national governments in the preparatory stage of European legislation, but their focus
rests exclusively on the strategic interactions between ministries and domestic interest groups in the formulation of the national position.
Whilst useful in its own right, the aggregate approach only goes so far (cf.
Scharpf 1997). Given the high degree of sectoralisation of European policymaking it is rather a bold assumption to treat member states as unitary actors. Clearly, each of these aggregate actors is composed of other actors
which have a certain capacity to act autonomously based on their own interests and perceptions. A series of Scandinavia-based studies has addressed
individual civil servants, but the focus of these studies has been on the roles
of individual officials role orientations and conceptions within Europeanised arenas, such as the committees and working groups of the European Commission and the Council of Ministers, and not on their actual
roles in uploading and other strategic interactions in the EU policy process
(Beyers 2005; Beyers and Trondal 2004; Egeberg 1999; Trondal 2002;
Trondal and Veggeland 2003). In fact, by all accounts, the EU-lobbying behaviour of national civil servants is relatively understudied when compared
to private interest groups (Mazey and Richardson 1993; Van Schendelen
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1998, 2006; Coen 1998; Woll 2006). The remainder of this chapter therefore explores the types of strategic instruments national ministries employ
and individual civil servants apply when they upload.
Uploading is a strategy aimed at ensuring that a member states status
quo within a given policy area is left untouched as much as possible. When
successful, it can be highly beneficial to member states, at least from an opportunity-costs perspective. It can be an effective strategy to maximise the
benefits and to minimise the costs of European policies because the more
a European policy fits the domestic context, the lower the adaptation costs in
the implementation process (Brzel 2002: 196). What is at stake are the
member states existing or preferred modes of governance. For example,
the Dutch approach to hygiene inspections in slaughterhouses, which is
self-regulation by the business sector, contrasts sharply with the more public and state-directed approaches such as in Italy. Which country should
adapt to the other countrys national system? Who will bear the costs?
Making EU policy on any given subject forges a confluence of hitherto divergent national modes of governance. Eising and Kohler-Koch (1999:
271) have noted that:
EC decision making does not start in a vacuum, but in a setting of varying national modes of governance. And precisely because the EC is
still in its formative phase, the actors are struggling to introduce what
they consider to be the most appropriate mode of governance The
negotiation of Community policies is always a competition about
modes of governance.
In this setting, member states are in (latent) competition regarding the best
models of integration. The conflicts are partly ideological, in some areas,
pitting liberals against pro-interventionists. But they may also derive something from the different potential consequences of (negative or positive
co-ordination) policies for the various member states, and in particular, specific policy sectors and interest groups within them (Hix 2002: 215).
Given these stakes, all stakeholders face the tactical question of when and
where to upload. The ideal timing of uploading policy preferences, according to Kassim, is before the Commission has considered it [an issue] or before it has drafted a text (Kassim 2001: 16). In formal EU legislative process
terms, this is the stage just before the Commission releases a green or white
paper on a topic and instigates consultations for new legislation or initiates
a legislative process. Once the Commission has adopted a proposal, it en-
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ters the EU legislative process and will be dealt with under one of three legislative procedures (i.e., consultation, co-decision or co-operation).
The position of the Commission in the legislative process is crucial.
Nothing, as Peterson writes (2002: 88), can become Community legislation unless the college [of commissioners] chooses to propose it. 19 The
importance of this prerogative cannot be underestimated.20 During the
process of proposal formation, the Commission has a variety of discretionary powers to shape the content of the final proposal (Larsson 2003).
For example, the Commission enjoys the power to initiate and control expert committees. The Commission herewith not only learns the positions
of member states by inviting their experts to appear before these committees, but also benefit from the expertise to improve the quality of their proposal. Or as Wessels and Rometsch (1996: 226) argue:
the Commission controls the game in this phase and its basic strategy
is one of engrenage i.e., to include relevant national civil servants
and representatives of lobby groups early enough in its work to get additional information and insights From the point of view of the national civil servants, there is an expectation that their input will be taken seriously by the Commission and that its later proposals will not
include unpleasant surprises for them.
Even when mutuality forms the underlying culture of the relationship between the Commission and the national civil servants, the relationship is in
fact unequal, to the advantage of the Commission. First, the Commission
may, for example:
set up an expert group to find out whether the Member States and interest groups are interested in trying to formulate a common position.
But should the Commission discover that the support for a common
approach is rather weak or seems to go in an unwanted direction, it can
hold the group on hold, waiting for the right moment to reactivate it
(Larsson 2003: 18).
Other powerful instruments are the selection of the chairman and the selection and appointment of the participants. As Larsson (2003: 18) observes:
allowing just a few experts, interest groups or Member States representatives to be part of a group is a strategic decision that may affect the result
and functioning of an expert group profoundly.
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There are clearly potentially significant first mover advantages for

member states if they manage to influence the contents of the Commissions proposal before it is sent into the formal legislative process. To examine whether this is in fact the case, and which types and combinations of uploading strategies work to bring this about, requires a systematic analysis of
the so-called pre-proposal or policy development phase as an arena in which
member states display strategic behaviour in order to influence the position
of the Commission (Larsson 2003). Our focus here is only a building block
towards this more general aim. We examine the strategic behaviour of individual civil servants and their ministries during the pre-proposal stage.
3.3 Research design

Data was collected from interviews with twenty-three Dutch civil servants
working within the field of veterinary policy, especially on issues concerning animal welfare, animal diseases and consumer safety. Semi-structured
interviews were conducted between November 2005 and July 2006 with
sixteen civil servants from the Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food
Safety ( hereafter referred to as Agriculture), one from the Ministry of Public
Health, Welfare and Sports (hereafter referred to as Public Health),21 three
from the Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (Voedsel en Warenautoriteit; hereafter referred to as VWA), one at the Institute of Food Safety
(IFS), and two respondents from the Dutch Permanent Representation to
the EU. This group of respondents includes higher civil servants as well as
middle-level civil servants from both ministries and agencies. The sample
also covers a variety of backgrounds: scientific veterinary experts, policy coordinators and director and generalist departmental managers.
The fact that the observations in this chapter cover only a single policy
area clearly limits this study. Still, at this exploratory stage of this kind of uploading research, this policy (sub)area constitutes a relevant empirical domain. It is both a well-established and crucial EU policy area. The health and
welfare of farm animals is a precondition for bilateral or multilateral trade.
The institutionalisation of animal health and welfare regulation predates
the establishment of the EEC and became an integral part of the EUs agricultural policies.22 In recent years, issues regarding the regulation of animal disease and welfare have been at the centre of international trade conflicts (e.g., export bans on unhealthy animals) and the subject of disputes
between consumer organisations and/or animal rights organisations and
the government. Finally, this policy area is rife with debate between mem-
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ber states because the regulation of animal disease and welfare is also part
of a fundamental debate between member states on regulatory styles or
modes of governance (cf. Knill 2001). The Netherlands, for example,
prefers the deregulation of meat hygiene inspections, whereby the state
delegates the treatment of animals and the hygiene at slaughterhouses
to private firm; whereas Italy maintains direct public supervision of the
slaughterhouses by departmental inspectors.
It is difficult to say at this stage if veterinary policy is a typical or an atypical, even crucial (George and Bennett 2005) case when it comes to the
study of uploading. However, being a fully Europeanised and institutionalised area, the strategic behaviour at the pre-proposal phase may at least
reveal the shape of things to come in other Europeanising policy areas. The
insights gained from this research may indicate the natural evolution of
strategic behaviour of other national ministries the more their policy areas
are integrated into the EU. In other words, as more governments and departments are confronted with the (forced) implementation of EU policies
that are less preferred, the more we can expect goal-seeking strategic interactions at this initial phase of the policy process.
3.4 Frontloading, signalling and coalition formation in veterinary

policy
From our interview data we were able to induce three recurrently mentioned forms of strategic behaviour that Dutch civil servants have employed
to upload their departments preferred policy preferences in an early as possible phase of preparatory policy-making by the Commission. We refer to
three types of strategic behaviour: signalling, frontloading, and coalition
formation.23
Signalling the Commission entails targeting and informing specific
Commission officials who work on policy issues that are important to the
member state and/or the national ministerial department. Lobbying designated Commission services by civil servants working as permanent representatives, is an example of this strategy. They inform Commission officials
about their departments position. The latter may use the information as an
input to the proposal, provided that the member states information is valuable to the Commission.
Frontloading goes one step further than signalling. It consists of acts designed to have a direct and substantive influence on the writing of a Commission proposal. The appointment of seconded national experts (SNEs,
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see also chapter 5) within the relevant Commission Directorate-General is

the central strategic instrument for frontloading. An SNE is either instructed by his superiors to steer the proposal towards the departments ideal
point, or it is expected that the SNE will automatically choose his or her national-cultural perspective as a point of reference when writing the proposal.
Once the Commission has initiated a proposal, a member state can seek
to form coalitions with other member states if the position of the Commission is further away from a member states position. This strategy will typically unfold during committee meetings with national experts and civil servants (Larsson 2003; Rhinard, 2002). However, we expect this strategy to be
the least preferred of the three. It is more cumbersome and diluted than
the other two, as it requires the forging of a critical mass of member states
with preferences not too divergent (and all the compromises and horsetrading this entails). Moreover, the Commission is well-positioned to dominate the committee, as it decides who sits on it, chairs it, and so on (Larsson
2003: 73). In the remainder of this section we will describe how Dutch civil
servants employ the three strategies, assess the conditions of their effectiveness, and reflect on the risks associated with them.
Signalling the Commission

Signalling implies a sender choosing to send a message to a receiver, in the
hope that the receiver will then choose to act upon the message received. In
EU policy, national Eurocrats send messages to the relevant Commission
officials with the purpose of persuading them to choose an action that will
benefit the former. This is the basic principle underlying all lobbies. In the
practice of EU policy processes, civil servants engage in as much lobbying as
private interest groups. Signalling could in fact be described as the lobbying
of the Commission, not by private interests but by the member states themselves.
Research on the member state lobbying of the Commission is sparse,
however. The best account is from Kassim et al.s volume on the role of Permanent Representations (2001). Located at the heart of the Union, permanent representatives fulfil many tasks for the various departments within
their respective member states, such as foreseeing opportunities, collecting
and circulating information, and elaborating negotiation strategies (Kassim 2001: 11). The role of civil servants at the Permanent Representation is
crucial, especially at the pre-proposal phase if they:
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propose action before the Commission has considered it or before it

has drafted a text This requires the assiduous cultivation of contacts
by national officials in the Permanent Representation and domestic
ministries with their opposite numbers in the Commission (Kassim
2001: 16):
According to one of our respondents, signalling is an increasingly salient
component of the job descriptions and work routines of Eurocrats working
at the Permanent Representation. Signalling forms their core business.
They know Brussels and their task is to inform and be kept informed on all
matters that are relevant to their field of expertise and are of interest to their
department. Civil servants at the Permanent Representation are expected to
successfully place:
issues on the agenda of the Commission that are of importance to
the Netherlands. In this way, we help the Commission with experience
we have as a member state and you immediately learn it when the
Commission does not think much of the information (Permanent Representation official).
Signalling is more than just agenda-setting and involves talking to the
people in the Commission who are going to write the proposal (Ministry of
Agriculture official) and thus to direct the text of the final proposal closer to
the preferences of the department. However, signalling is not a one-way
process, but based on reciprocity. Information is a very precious asset to
both sides:
The Commission always wants to be kept informed. That is an issue
that is often forgotten in The Hague. When something happens in a
member state [e.g., the outbreak of an animal disease], other member
states contact the Commission. The Commission always wants to provide answers to those member states. If the Commission fails to do so,
danger exists that member states will take action by themselves, something that is not desired, of course. This way unity will be lost. I always
try to prevent this by having contact [with the Commission] as much as
I can so that I can contact them each time something occurs. So I can
keep the Commission updated (Permanent Representation official).
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Signalling as described above is not only part of the job of Permanent Representation officials, but increasingly that of civil servants in The Hague
as well. This signalling can take various forms, from just giving a call to
asking for a draft of an upcoming report or stepping into a Commission officials office when a national civil servant happens to be in Brussels for a
meeting (VWA official). The nationality of the Commission officials is an important issue here. Although our respondents told us that nationality played
no major role in the approaching of a Commission official, it was clear from
their further explications that the presence of Dutch people within the Commission services (both permanent as well as seconded national civil servants; see more below) can make a difference. Dutch Commission officials
more often than not contact their national departments when they receive
information on specific subjects. They are also more easily approachable by
their compatriots, notwithstanding the fact that Dutch commission officials
consider themselves to be acting in strict accordance with Commission
guidelines concerning loyalty and neutrality.
Most interviewees regard signalling to be the most effective when it is
embedded in enduring relationships between national Eurocrats and Commission officials. They claimed that trust is the most important aspect in
building and maintaining lasting and effective relationships between national and Commission officials:
I work a lot on personal relationships. I know two Commission directors very well. When I arrive, they know something is happening.
Whenever there are conflicts Ive always been keen on seeing the problems from their perspective as well and not just trying to get the most
out of it for the Netherlands (Ministry of Agriculture official).
The same interviewee, a very senior civil servant within the department, illustrated his point by describing the following event that took place several
years ago:
The first meeting with these people [the higher Commission officials]
often occurs during an incident. In my case, I built up trust during the
handling of a crisis concerning the presence of hormones in animal
fodder. The Commission proposed destroying all of the animals that
had been fed the contaminated fodder. I told them that we just had
foot and mouth disease and that a lot of livestock had been destroyed,
but that this time there was no immediate threat to public health. In
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the end, we only had to destroy a far smaller proportion of the animals
than initially discussed. I then implemented the decisions carefully
and transparently (Ministry of Agriculture official).
Ultimately, signalling is applied by both agriculture Eurocrats at the Permanent Representation and the home department. Nurturing networks by national civil servants with Commission officials is a way of institutionalising
the signalling strategy. Similar to the situation with private interest lobbies
in Brussels, easy and swift access to officials who are co-ordinating or writing the relevant proposals is an important asset for national ministries to
cultivate. At the same time, interviewees emphasise that signalling alone is
unlikely to do the trick as far as successful uploading is concerned. From
the perspective of the national department, i.e., the sender, signalling may
appear a relatively cheap and direct strategy, but from the perspective of the
receiver (Commission officials) it is bound to be just one of many signals
from different sources they receive on a continuous basis. They are not only
being signalled by Eurocrats from other member states but also by a range
of private interest organisations. When the number of signals from a variety of sources increases, it becomes increasingly difficult for Commission
officials to properly assess their relative value. The accumulation of signals
may produce a level of noise that may discourage Commission officials
from properly scrutinising and assessing the individual signals.
Frontloading proposals
Frontloading aims at exerting direct, substantive influence on the writing of
the proposal. Members may obtain direct access to the writing of a Commission proposal by seconding national officials at the targeted DirectorateGeneral. SNEs comprise one of three categories of Commission officials.
The first consists of the permanent staff of the Commission services (i.e.,
grade A officials) who are recruited for the service after having successfully
passed their concours. The second group consists of support and administrative staff. SNEs, on the other hand, are appointed for fixed periods of
time. They are part of the Directorate General and work on a specific file
for a period of up to three years. One of the pragmatic reasons for their appointment is that SNEs assist the Commission services staff and bring
expertise on issues the Commission lacks knowledge on, or as the official
logic of secondments describes it:
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Seconded National Experts (SNEs) have a dual role: to bring to the

Commission their experience of the issues they are used to dealing
with and to take back to their home administration the knowledge
of Community issues which they acquire during their secondment.
They are seconded in order to let the Commission benefit from the
high level of their professional knowledge and experience, in particular in areas where such expertise is not readily available in various
fields (EC, http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/personnel_administration/sne_
en. htm, 24 July 2006).
Research on seconded national civil servants is sparse, let alone their strategic position and roles. SNEs are often alluded to in European Commission
services studies, but have rarely been studied as actors within the EU policy
process. Trondal argues that seconded national officials are treated as the
under-researched Cinderella of the Commission within the academic
literature. But in fact they deserve more attention for their function as a
parallel administration within the Commission (Trondal 2001). Trondal
concludes that seconded personnel to the Commission are likely to put
particular emphasis on pre-established national and sectoral senses of belonging due to their primary institutional affiliations at the national level of
governance (Trondal 2001: n.p.).
Our interviews with civil servants at the Department of Agriculture and
of SNEs in this department shed a somewhat different light on the phenomenon of secondment (see also chapter 5). Although this is often officially denied by the Dutch civil service, the Ministry of Agriculture does strategically
second civil servants to Directorates-General of interest to the ministry. The
official denial stems from the fact that the Dutch view of the Commission
has for a long time been that the Commission is a supranational body that
should operate impartially with regard to member states. One of our respondents told us that strategic use of secondment is something the French
do, but not the Dutch:
The French government positions civil servants at the Commission
with an assignment. If they fail, it can shake up the rest of their careers.
We are less tough but we do have our discussions on this issue (Ministry of Agriculture official).
We found that this view is on-the-record policy. Off the record, secondment
is perhaps the most important strategic instrument the Dutch Ministry of
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Agriculture employs to influence Commission proposals. This is expressed

by one of the departments top officials, a director-general:
The position one [a seconded national official] has is not chosen by coincidence. It [secondment] is not just [an instrument] for the careers of
civil servants. Secondment is of course good for their careers, but the
position they occupy is also of importance to the department. They are
in a place where we have interests. The places are strategically chosen.
You dont give them instructions, but you can do anything you need to
do to ensure that they maintain a certain loyalty to the department. But
you also deliver a Dutchman to Brussels who will work from a Dutch
perspective (Ministry of Agriculture official).
The salience of secondments as a strategic instrument is underlined by the
fact that a special working group exists to co-ordinate secondments to the
EU and other international organisations that are relevant to the policy areas of agriculture. At the end of the 1990s, the Directorate of International
Affairs set up a Working Group for Mobility, headed by the assistant-director of the DIA, to co-ordinate the appointment of SNEs. An interviewee
from the working group observed that:
Within this department we consider international mobility to be very
important. We have people in positions who participate in the making
of important decisions. They do not deal directly with the Dutch position, but they are placed there strategically, so it is not a coincidence at
all. Secondments are strategic (Ministry of Agriculture official).
The strategic importance of SNEs is also recognised by the Dutch Food and
Consumer Safety Agency (VWA). According to one of its senior officials,
the ultimate goal of secondments is indeed the pre-cooking (Larsson
2003) of Commission proposals:
We [VWA] are in the process of developing outcome-oriented regulatory policies. I do not want our policies to be battered around because the
Commission has decided to go for the lowest common denominator.
So what I want is for the Commission to start conceiving regulatory
policy the way we do it here at the VWA. Id like to steer the Commission in the direction we are heading I have received permission from
Agriculture to station two of our [VWA] people at the Food and Veteri-
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nary Office in Dublin for a few years I think the changes from output
to outcome control we have made look very promising. Thus, I try to
exert some influence at the source [of the policy process], to in turn exert some influence on the writing side (VWA official).
The question is: how is this done? How is this strategy executed? It would
not be entirely accurate to see the issue of secondments as a one-way street.
Reciprocity between international organisations and national governments
seems to be a necessary condition for secondments:
International organisations often want to address a problem, but dont
have sufficient manpower at that moment. The deal we make is that we
find it interesting as well [sic]. We second someone to the organisation
and pay all or part of the expenses. They can then begin doing the important work [e.g., against an outbreak of bird flu], that is also important to the Netherlands. This is how we can acquire influence on things
that are important to the Netherlands (Ministry of Agriculture official).
But this does not imply that the Ministry of Agriculture can freely choose
from amongst the available positions:
The input from the Netherlands should add to the Commissions work.
The Netherlands has a good reputation when it comes to cases involving animal diseases and animal welfare. The Netherlands stands a
good chance of gaining some positions in these areas if our department decides to lobby for them (Permanent Representation official).
Active lobbying involves a good network and preferably personal relationships between Dutch and European officials. I know the director of the
Food and Veterinary Office very well, one respondent told us, and he asked
me for personnel. I immediately arranged that (VWA official).
To what extent is this strategy effective in terms of policy outcome? Do
seconded civil servants steer the direction of the policy process? Or is the ultimate benefit of having seconded officials within the Commission to take
the knowledge of Community issues back home as the official statement of
the Commission notes? Seconded national civil servants are expected to be
loyal to the Commission and to develop supranational identifications via
their frequent interactions with the permanent staff. Some of our respondents are clear about the role of seconded national servants: once they begin
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in their positions they should be loyal to the Commission and should not be
put under pressure by their previous department. At the same time, no respondent denies the benefits that the department accrues from having a
seconded official at a strategic position. One benefit is that the parent department can establish a larger network for the entire department through a
seconded official:
We try to encourage the directors of the SNEs to visit them on location.
The SNE makes an appointment with his unit head, the director of the
unit where he works, and if possible, with the director-general or the
vicedirector-general. They first talk about the project, but eventually
they end up discussing a whole range of other issues. The purpose of
these meetings is to get to know one another. It is much easier to pick
up the phone when you know someone personally (Civil servant at the
Ministry of Agriculture).
The goal is to use the SNE and his or her position to pave the way for high
level networks. SNEs are further provided with the basic technical facilities
to keep in touch with the parent department. That way they can communicate easily with their colleagues via Internet and via the mail, so that both
sides remain informed. The annual securing of The Hagues networks occurs during the come back days when all of the SNEs stationed throughout
the many international organisations around the world are invited back for
a two-day meeting. SNEs are requested to give seminars on their ongoing
affairs. Directors-general are expected to attend these meetings as well. The
two-day meeting is concluded by an informal dinner with the directorsgeneral and secretaries-general. The presence of top-level officials sends
a signal to the rest of the department that this is an important meeting.
Sometimes, if the events are managed well and the situation allows it, a
co-ordinated network of SNEs can lead to the exertion of significant influence on the policy-making process, even as early and as crucial as setting its
agenda. One such instance occurred during a crisis management situation
involving avian influenza (bird flu) in early March 2006, when a senior
Dutch Agriculture official was called upon to attend a meeting at the Food
and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) offices:
I have seconded someone to the FAO for avian influenza, someone to
the OIE [Office International des Epizooties] and a couple of people to
DG SANCO [the Directorate General for Health and Consumer Af-
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fairs]. What happened is that suddenly all of these organisations became preoccupied with the avian influenza situation. Last week I was
called to a conference at the FAO to speak about crisis management in
cases involving outbreaks of avian influenza. The United States were
also invited. There was also someone from OIE, who happened to be
a Dutch woman from my directorate who was seconded to the OIE. Another participant in the meeting was a representative from the European Commission, again seconded from my directorate. And finally
there was Louise Fresco24 who was joined by yet another SNE [at FAO]
seconded from my directorate. I jokingly proposed lets do the meeting in Dutch with an English translator (Ministry of Agriculture official).
The basic impression by the Dutch officials, a majority of whom were SNEs
we interviewed, shows that the purposeful and strategic use of seconding
may lead to situations where a (small) national state can have a substantial
impact on decision-making and agenda setting.
Ethical guidelines notwithstanding, SNEs bring their own national doctrines and their Dutch norms and values to Brussels:
I think that everyone from the Netherlands, whether they are seconded
officials or not, approach their work from the perspective of Dutch
norms and values. That is very valuable. Therefore, I think that as a
member state you can gain influence here if a member state has a lot of
officials seconded to the Commission, so that the process in Brussels
becomes similar to that of your own country (SNE).
This occurred to some extent when the Dutch were invited to second a national civil servant to work on the meat hygiene control dossier. The official
was seconded to DG SANCO and worked for three years on the preparation
of a proposal for meat hygiene control as part of the General Food Law. The
Netherlands has been in favour of developing and implementing a regulatory system whereby hygiene inspections are no longer performed by the
state but by the private sector itself. The essence of this system consists of
the fact that the Dutch government only assumes system responsibilities,
remains removed from the actual physical inspection of the slaughterhouses and meat-processing industries, and instead only inspects the systems
designed by the private sector itself. The proposal that the Commission submitted to the EP and the Council contained the mode of governance preferred by the Netherlands. However, the interviewee explains:
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the European Parliament removed a number of essential issues

from the proposal. This can be mainly attributed to the Rapporteur. He
was a former East German veterinarian with a strong statist perspective. He removed a number of essential issues. The European Parliaments Environment, Public Health and Food Safety Committee rejected some of the Rapporteurs proposals but left others intact. The
most essential element of the proposal that did not make it to the final
draft was the proposal that slaughterhouses be allowed to control the
hygiene of their meat themselves, under the supervision of a veterinarian. The European Parliament preferred that government officials
handle this The European Parliaments amendments were quite a
setback for the Netherlands. It was very inconvenient for this sector because this was the course preferred by the Netherlands (SNE).
Despite this, the Ministry of Agriculture and the sector were content to
some extent, because the proposals that did survive offered sufficient room
for the Netherlands to implement the crucial elements of the preferred
course in the Netherlands. This case illustrates that although seconded nationals cannot always forge a preferred position, they can redirect the course
of policy development in a specific direction. Although our major points
were eliminated we thought that the end result was a very modern regulation that enabled us to work with the system-level monitoring of meat hygiene (Ministry of Agriculture official).
The above examples should not give the impression that the Commission can simply be manipulated or steered in a desired direction by a national ministry or agency that seconds its civil servants. SNEs are offered opportunities as well as confronted with constraints when they work for their
specific departments. Due to the information of seconded officials, national
departments are better informed about the positions of other member
states and thus oversee potential dilemmas and difficulties of shifting towards a certain of mode of governance. However, the Commission is well
aware of the potential dangers inherent in entrusting files to seconded national officials like the seconded respondents we interviewed. SNEs have to
operate in a highly political environment where the stakes for the Commission and member states can be very high. An example that illustrates this
concerns the dilemma of how to treat confidential information:
When do you give what kind of information to the home front? The
Commission produces internal reports of its negotiations. The Com-
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mission then says that the reports are internal and we wont share
them with the member states. Well, on certain occasions, for example,
the Netherlands wants to know the content of a specific report. One
thing you can do is to give an oral summary of the report. Going one
step further would mean doing this by mail. Or you might just send the
entire piece. You can do all this the day after the release of the internal
report or a month later. There is an entire grey area of options and what
the effects of these options are is dependent on the number of interests
that play a role. If the negotiations only concern one country well, in
that case you can inform that member state of what the Commission
intends to do. But it changes when several member states, with diverging interests, are involved. If you dont act carefully as a seconded official, or according to the rules of loyalty [which every seconded national
official has to agree to upon assuming office] you could end up banging your head against the wall (SNE).
Therefore, if the Commission:
has files that ought to remain secret, they give it to that person [a seconded official] to see what happens next. I dont know whether the
Commission does this consciously, but they are, of course, not naive
(SNE).
SNEs are generally hired to work on a specific dossier. As noted earlier,
they inevitably bring their own national and professional norms and values
to the task, and this is often precisely why the Commission wants a representative of a certain member state to work on a proposal. The moment an
SNE enters his or her directorate-general, he or she will inevitably experience a clash of governance modes:
There was much ado when I was appointed to Brussels. A storm of
protest came from Italy because it was fiercely opposed to the Dutch
approach regarding meat hygiene controls. They felt that the Netherlands had squandered their meat inspection responsibility by privatising inspections and giving the state only a small role. The Italian CVO
[Chief Veterinary Officer] invested a lot of effort in preventing my secondment (SNE).
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The secondment could not be prevented, however, but this particular SNE
did not have an easy inauguration into Brussels:
My secondment was looked upon very sceptically, especially by colleagues from Southern Europe. They were very suspicious and critical. My patron, a Fleming and the director of my department supported me while my immediate colleagues most of whom were
French or Italian were the most suspicious. They were sceptical
about the Dutch way of thinking regarding meat inspections However, they had not been instructed by their governments to oppose my
work. It was their natural attitude. They have been brought up differently (SNE).
To be successful in these circumstances requires a lot from an individual.
Our interviewee was fluent in French and Italian and this certainly helped
him establish cordial relationships with his colleagues. He also spoke at
meetings in Italy on the subject in Italian to explain the Dutch approach.
And perhaps most of all, you have to show that youre not a bad guy (SNE).
In conclusion, we have observed that the use of secondments is a highly
preferred and strategic instrument for influencing the content and direction of Commission proposals, but it does not necessarily lead to a successful outcome. Working as a seconded national civil servant is fraught with
pitfalls and the Commission is constantly checking the loyalty of its seconded officials.
Coalition formation
The coalition formation strategy typically emerges when representatives of
relevant national ministries convene for the first time at a committee meeting. An interviewee gave us an impression of such a meeting, which was
concerned with the drafting of a regulation that would control foodstuffs
and animal fodder as part of the General Food Law:
On the basis of a rough draft by the Commission, we [a number of experts from various departments] took a look at the various draft provisions, keeping in mind what the position of the Netherlands should be
We put our ideas down on paper and went to Brussels and submitted
our viewpoint very explicitly The meeting began with a round during which each member state presented its views. You immediately
pick your potential allies on different issues during this round. You de-
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cide on an issue-to-issue basis who your allies will be. The views of the
member states remain quite consistent throughout the subsequent
committee meetings. So you find yourself in agreement with country
A on issue X and with country B on issue Z. Then at the coffee machine
you exchange some more ideas in a very informal manner (Ministry of
Agriculture official).
Prior to a committee meeting, the positions of the other member states on
the various issues are often unknown to you. It is even less clear who your
potential allies are and what the results of the meetings will be.
A more activist stance is also possible, of course. Interviewees were quick
to point out that there are alternatives to letting the outcome of committee
meetings be determined by happenstance events. Many of those who regularly travelled back and forth between Brussels and their home base to participate in Commission committees (and Council working groups) on a regular basis stressed the importance of informal discussions around the
coffee machine during breaks, after lunches, as well as over drinks and,
occasionally, during dinners before or after a meeting.25 However, these informal circuits are more effective when they are not just limited to committee meetings. One interviewee, who worked on the General Food Laws
inspection of hygiene measures, set up and co-ordinated a so-called fourcountry consultation group. Some time in 2004, during Luxembourgs
presidency, German, Dutch, Belgian and Luxembourgian civil servants began meeting on the day before the actual committee meeting in order to discuss the agenda of the upcoming meeting, and to co-ordinate the various issues regarding the import of veterinary products:
During these meetings we look for issues on which we can reach an
agreement and where our views diverge. On issues we agree on, we
support each other. and take similar positions. We also discuss tactics: who will say what and when At the last committee meeting it
went so well that we dominated the meeting We had an alliance.
What happened then was that none of the newer member states said
anything which is not unusual. But countries like France and the
United Kingdom also remained silent. The other countries then apparently figure that when Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium already agree the issue is pretty much settled. We have to be careful with
this kind of situation, however. We must not become too dominant
and pursue variations. Meaning that we should sometimes openly
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declare: I dont agree with you. You shouldnt create the impression
that the three of us have pre-cooked everything beforehand. I dont
think the Commission would be pleased with this state of affairs. But
nevertheless we keep going! (VWA official).
The consultation between the four countries and the subsequent domination of the committee meeting one must admit occurred during the
rather weak Luxembourg Presidency. A small group of member states had
managed to pre-cook a position and had presented themselves as a united
front vis--vis the Commission and the rest of the member states. Under a
normal presidency, there is much less room to operate in this fashion and
the co-ordination and negotiation costs between the member states are
much higher. Nevertheless, this example shows that in a setting with a large
number of member states, coalition formation and the pre-cooking of a
common position, a small core group of member states can form a front
against the Commission and overwhelm the other member states.
This kind of close co-operation between a limited number of member
states not only depends on the weaknesses of the presidency but also on the
personal relationships between the national Eurocrats involved. In the
aforementioned example, the core group often held informal meetings and
if this could not take place in a restaurant for financial reasons, they met
over home-cooked dinners. Of course this requires a certain level of good
personal chemistry.
In a more general sense, the expert committee meetings further impede
the strategic actions of member states because of a lack of information
regarding the initial positions of the other member states. If you add the
complex voting structure to this situation it is not difficult to imagine how
difficult it is to determine who will form coalitions with whom, let alone
predict the results of the meeting or the Commissions final decision. One
further important point should be stressed, however. Our interviews were
conducted two years after the EU enlargement. Prior to the enlargement,
coalitions in the veterinary field were predictably clustered around the
larger member states. Since enlargement, however, agreements within this
arena have become much more difficult to predict:
strategic insight is no longer important. In the old days, the voting
blocks were almost always fixed. If the Netherlands was in favour of
something, the Italians opposed it. Then if we approached the Germans to support our views and Germany concurred, then the issue
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was pretty much settled. We just needed to sit back and relax and add
nothing. Furthermore, you used to have member states with a certain
number of votes so you could make your own calculations. Nowadays,
it has become so complex that it is not worth trying to calculate. With
twenty-five member states, calculations have become impossible.
With which combination of states can you achieve a voting blocking
majority? The number of parameters has grown so large that strategic
interactions with the representatives of other member states within
the committee have become useless. Too many variations are now possible (VWA official).
Despite the possibilities for forging small blocks of like-minded countries
to dominate the expert committee meetings that pressure the Commission
to adopt your positions, this coalition formation strategy is probably less
likely to succeed than frontloading plus signalling. Expert groups are established once the Commission has already adopted a direction. It requires a
civil servants networking skills and long-term personal devotion to an issue to invest in coalition formation in order to change the course of a discussion within an expert group toward his countrys interests. But the Commission remains in the drivers seat and to a large extent determines the
substance of the proposal it submits to the Council and Parliament. Effectively approaching the Commission before it sends something through to
various other committees makes perfect sense.
3.5 Eurocratic work as strategic behaviour: Conclusions

This chapter explored the strategic behaviour of national civil servants during the process of uploading departmental preferences at the pre-proposal
phase. Not only does it contribute to the research on a relatively unexplored
phase of the EU policy process but it also contributes to the study of organisational and individual behaviour at national ministries and among civil
servants of the EU member states. It is perhaps one of the first studies on
the strategic behaviour of national ministries and civil servants during this
crucial phase. If a member state manages to intercede successfully before
the Commission initiates a directive or regulation proposal, our theoretical
argument proposes, it can impose its preferences on the other member
states by influencing the proposals text. In order for other member states to
alter this text and influence the proposal requires the forging of a coalition
with a critical mass of other member states during subsequent committee
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meetings. Given the Commissions powers during this phase and the difficulties of forming a successful coalition, the member states that move first
actually end up succeeding in locking-in their own positions before the
Commission formally submits the proposal to the Council and European
Parliament.
This chapter has identified three strategic options based on this logic.
Two of these options yield first-mover advantages. The first of these is signalling. Signalling was not only considered a major task of Eurocrats at the
Permanent Representation, but was also actively employed by their departmental counterparts in The Hague. Moreover, not only middle-level civil
servants but also the high-ranking civil servants we interviewed reported
that they actively contacted and informed Commission officials as an important aspect of their EU-related work.
As regards frontloading, secondment turned out to be a highly strategic
instrument during the pre-proposal phase, a point that has largely remained unexplored in research on SNEs. Existing studies rightly suggest
that secondments will affect role perceptions of seconded national officials
to some extent and eventually instigate a process of Europeanisation of the
culture and social practices at national departments upon their return to
their own departments. What has been overlooked, however, is the strategic
use of seconded national civil servants in the uploading of national preferences into the EU policy process. In our interviews we found that, more
than top-level instructions, the natural national perceptions and outlooks
of the seconded national experts were considered as the most important
mechanism through which national preferences are translated into Commission proposals. Once uploaded and launched into the supranational
policy process, the preferences of the member state are usually locked into
the highly institutionalised policy process at this level.
Finally, the findings we presented on the coalition formation strategy of
member states during the proposal formation phase underscore the findings in the literature thus far. The Commission has extensive formal and informal powers during the pre-proposal phase; it not only has the right to initiate a proposal but also the capacities to steer and shape the committee
deliberation process during the pre-proposal phase. The increased number
of member states and increased complexity of voting influence among the
member states within the Council working groups during the subsequent
decision-making phase have made it almost impossible for member states
to operate strategically during the proposal-formation phase. Thus, the only
successful case we noted is, in a sense, exceptional: the co-ordination of
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national positions among the four countries occurred in one specific area
during a weak presidency. Like in the case of signalling, individual civil servants are alone out there when negotiating with their counterparts from
other member states. Furthermore, they need to know how the game is
played and must have sufficient knowledge and expertise to earn the necessary standing and reputation.
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CHAPTER 4
GETTING THINGS DONE IN EUROPEAN

POLICE CO-OPERATION
I am here to represent the Netherlands, and my colleagues back home
sometimes find it difficult to appreciate that. They do the bidding of
the individual ministries. Their arena is about pulling and hauling
between ministries. Here the arena is about pulling and hauling between countries (Official of the Dutch Permanent Representation in
the EU).
Q: Are you a Dutchman, a European, or a Euregional citizen?
I am first and foremost a Euregional policeman. As far as my organisational back office is concerned, I am embedded in the Dutch system,
but the actual job lies in this transnational region, and this is on the increase. So I have to play chess simultaneously on two boards: the
Dutch and the Euregional. That implies an additional work load.
Q: Do you behave differently because of this?
There is no hierarchy in the co-operation with the other countries. It is
more a social, network-like thing. Co-operation is all youve got. It is
much less direct than working in a national command hierarchy. You
actually have to place yourself in the other persons shoes (A senior
police official in the Dutch province of Limburg).
4.1 Eurocratic work in the Third Pillar: A different world?

In this chapter, as in the previous one, we will look at European governance
through the eyes of people who routinely do it as part of their jobs as national civil servants. We want to know how these national Eurocrats operate
in international arenas and how this EU-related work is embedded in and
facilitated by the organisations they are part of. In chapter 3, we focused on
the veterinary policy case, in which the Commission was a crucial actor,
getting things done in european police co-operation
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driving a highly institutionalised regime of technocratic deliberation and

negotiation, which is punctuated only occasionally by politically explosive
issues such as BSE and avian influenza. We demonstrated that, in this context, Eurocratic work evolves around a number of key tactics (signalling,
frontloading and coalition formation) that allow the main actors to gain and
maintain control of the course and outcomes of key dossiers.
In the current chapter, we switch our focus to study Dutch Eurocrats in
the field of European police co-operation. They are mainly employed either
by the Ministries of the Interior and Justice, by the 25 regional police forces,
or by the single national police force; some of them are stationed at the
Dutch Permanent Representation in Brussels or at organisations like Europol. Police co-operation is to a large extent a Third Pillar issue area,
which means that it is governed by a much less developed regime of collective transnational decision-making than a First Pillar area like veterinary
policy. We suspect that this arena may offer national Eurocrats different
types of incentives for getting things done than those afforded to their veterinary counterparts.
The quotes cited above illustrate what we would like to argue here: that
the role orientations and rules of thumb the officials who work on police cooperation have developed in the course of their European experiences vary
markedly. They do business in Europe in very different ways. Depending
on the issue area and its rules of the game, national Eurocrats operate in
very different kinds of policy networks at the European level. Grasping
these various logics is pivotal to understanding what it takes to operate at the
nexus between national and transnational policy-making.
4.2 The case of data availability: Messy policy-making in Europe

Data availability is a hot topic at the various European Justice and Home Affairs institutions. The transnational sharing of information on anything
people, communication data, (stolen) vehicles, arms, explosives, poison,
money that may lead to safety or security threats among the member
states is considered vital by all of the governments involved. Yet plans to
facilitate this information sharing have aroused serious privacy concerns,
fears about a loss of sovereignty in this key domain of state activity, as well as
charges that these measures may undermine the rule of law. Different national viewpoints on data-sharing have surfaced repeatedly in the preparations for the Council of JHA Ministers, and as such, this case provides us
with a poignant view of how Dutch Eurocrats deal with such a hot topic. Be-
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low we present our observations and interviews in several arenas where this
issue gets processed and plays out in terms of both policy-making and implementation.
An expert committee: Working Party on Police Co-operation

On 25 January 2006, a meeting was held at the Dutch Ministry of the Interior in The Hague. Its purpose was to prepare the Dutch position on a proposal from the Austrian Presidency for a Council decision on improving police
co-operation between EU member states. A major part of the proposal concerned procedures for improving transnational information sharing
among police forces. The head of the Dutch delegation had to present the
Dutch position on the proposal a day later, during a meeting of the Police
Co-operation Working Party, one of the countless committees that prepare
and help implement European policies and programmes. He was a senior
official at the Interior Ministry and was chairing the discussion. In attendance were four of his counterparts from the Ministry of Justice (the Ministries of the Interior and Justice share responsibility for Dutch policing policy). There were also two representatives from the Dutch National Police,
both veterans who had seen their last operational action years ago.
They discussed the technical aspects of the Austrian proposal: could the
Dutch police departments meet the requirements envisaged in the proposal, would they have to adjust their information systems, and could one expect the police forces of other member states to do likewise? The relevant
treaties which might bear upon the proposed measures were presented. No
mention was made of ministerial or parliamentary decisions or opinions on
the subject. There was no real debate about anything on the agenda and the
participants seemed to agree on the issues, with the Dutch position simply
emerging from that consensus. Some of the policemen present did not
seem to be fully aware of the European procedural nitty-gritty involved in
European policy-making. They inquired about the European Parliaments
role. One of the Justice Department civil servants suggested in a condescending manner that they attend a course on European matters to be offered soon.
The meeting of the Police Co-operation Working Party took place in
Brussels the next day on 26 January. The meeting was an all-day affair in the
same enormous conference room where the Justice and Home Affairs
(JHA) Council of Ministers meets, the eventual end station for all these
preparatory meetings. Every participant could speak in his or her native language with interpreters available. All of the participants wore earphones
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throughout the meeting. Film cameras were an essential part of the interaction process because everyone had their own screen on their desks with
each speaker in close up, for everyone to read his or her every facial expression. There were also several enormous screens projecting the same images. The Dutch delegation was small; besides the delegation leader there
was also an official from the Dutch Permanent Representation to the EU.
The most striking aspect of the meeting ritual was that participants were referred to not by their own names, but by their countrys. Every participant
was seated around a large oval table, behind a sign which bore the countrys
name. When a participant wanted to speak the chairperson would grant
him or her permission, by declaring: The Netherlands, the floor is yours,
and would wrap up the Dutch presentation with words like Thank you, the
Netherlands. Another striking thing was how little contact there was between the representatives of the different delegations. Everybody was polite
but reserved. There were very few informal greetings or casual asides. Participants were also very formal toward the chair. The Presidency had just
changed hands, as it does every six months in the EU. And so, each of the
speakers prefaced his or her opening remarks by formally wishing the Austrian chair well with their presidency and expressing their intention to fully
co-operate. The politeness was reciprocal as all of the participants had found
small gifts at their desk when arriving in the conference room, bureaucratic
gifts like a tie or a booklet with the logo of the new presidency on it.
Furthermore, there was no sign of the much-vaunted Brussels lunchingcum-lobbying circuit. The Dutch delegation had a simple lunch together at
the Salle Bleu, one of the restaurants in the building. The head of the delegation finished his lunch before the others to have a talk with the Irish delegation on a project the Irish had proposed, which partly overlapped with a
Dutch proposal that was also up for discussion. He also made a phone call
to The Hague to one of his colleagues.
During the meeting, the various proposals on the agenda were discussed
in depth. It was a long day with arcane technical matters receiving much of
the attention. The key proposal had been discussed before in other Council
working groups like ENFOPOL, ENFOCUSTOM, CRIMORG and COMIX.
Remarkably, almost no one referred to these earlier discussions; it was as if
the participants had never been briefed on these other meetings.
Meanwhile, the Austrian chair tried to reach agreements on as many aspects of the proposal as possible. The meeting was mostly about gauging,
shaping and bending words until everybody could agree. By the end of the
discussion, the chair offered a short summary of the suggested proposal
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changes. She also summed up the issues for which no consensus had been
reached. The proposal was now forwarded to next weeks Comit de lArticle
Trente-Six (CATS), another co-ordinating committee of more senior civil
servants. CATS would zoom in on those parts of the proposal on which no
consensus had been reached. These parts were now referred to as the more
political parts of the proposal. Apparently, they were not technical, for no
consensus had been reached. After CATS had been fully discussed, perhaps
modified and signed off on the proposal, it was then sent further up the European policy-making hierarchy, to the Comit de Reprsentants Permanents
(COREPER), the meeting of the EU ambassadors of the member states.
Once it was approved there, the proposal would end up being voted on in the
JHA Council of Ministers.
A high-level committee: CATS

The Ministry of Justice official who was formerly at the Permanent Representation in Brussels and who had participated in the preparation of the
CATS committee indicated that he was acutely aware of the disjointed nature of the working group system. He thought the European Commission
actually exploits the organised anarchy in the Third Pillar by offering its
proposals to different working groups, hoping that at least one of these
channels will end up directing this proposal to the Council. However, the
leader of the Dutch delegation to the CATS committee disagreed that the
Commission was playing the system. He thought it would be a great improvement if all proposals to the Council in the Third Pillar could be made
by the Commission. This would at least bring some consistency to the
messiness with one actor who can maintain an overview of the entire
process. This is currently not the case. His chief concern with the current
system was that political pressures might lead the high-level actors in the
CATS and JHA to approve a hastily patched-together proposal that comes
out of nowhere. According to him, the culture of the European arena is
such that any decision is considered better than no decision at all. He
deplored the ad-hocracy this tended to produce, citing instances in which
decisions clearly conflicted with prior CATS decisions, or with a decision
made by another forum in the JHA.
The head of the Dutch delegation also noted that there was another form
of pressure in the CATS committee process. At the end of the day, the CATS
participants are accountable to their own national bureaucratic constituencies. Thus they each keep one key criterion in mind: is there something in it
for us? The bottom line of the CATS meetings is that all of the participants
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are first and foremost national civil servants, and feel compelled to act as
such or face uncomfortable questions back home.
The CATS delegation leaders identify themselves first and foremost as
national civil servants, at least as much as the participants in the Working
Party on Police Co-operation described earlier, even though they seem to
know each other better than their lower-level counterparts do, addressing
each other (by way of the chairperson) by their first names during the meeting. The Dutch delegation leader said that he himself would like to act more
as a genuine European, taking the common good instead of the Dutch interest as his reference point for judging proposals and taking positions. Unfortunately, he said, his colleagues in The Hague, as well as his counterparts
in forums such as CATS are overwhelmingly locked into their national perspectives and seem primarily intent on preserving their existing national
policies, procedures and judicial systems. He welcomed the pressure put
on his colleagues by the Foreign Ministry and Permanent Representation,
who regularly argue that something has to happen, some improvements
have to be made. If it werent for that, everybody would simply lie back and
wait.
A member of the Permanent Representation confirms this point of view:
There is very little vision on which way to head in police co-operation. The
general idea is to try to avoid inconveniences brought on by anything new. It
would be so much better to try and benefit from new initiatives. A colleague
from the Ministry of the Interior hints at why civil servants seem to act the
way they do: As long as there is no clear political vision regarding a certain
theme, there is not much vision developed among civil servants either. We
stick to the political vision. This, he said, breeds conservatism: We are
against a proposal because we have always been against it even if no one
knows any more what exactly was the reason for taking that position.
The CATS delegation leader considered himself lucky to have a European-minded minister. This gave him a lot of support in urging his colleagues to get on with it. The Dutch Minister for Justice had made crimefighting his top priority and was strongly aware of its European dimension.
After the CATS meeting, the delegation leader pointed out that this provided him with opportunities. Within the Netherlands, you often act as the
representative of an EU position: you overact your European allegiance in
order to create room to manoeuvre. You do the reverse in Brussels, by saying: I cannot possibly take this back to my superiors at home.
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An operational arena: Europol

As far as data availability is concerned, it is all about trust, according to many
policemen as it is indeed the case in other areas of European police co-operation as well. Even if police officers are aware of the necessity of international collaboration in the fighting of crime, they will not necessarily share
information with their foreign colleagues. They cite various reasons. First,
professional jealousy: Why should we allow others to show off in cracking
cases that we did all the work on? Second, reputation: Who knows what police departments in funny countries will do with our information? The
new member states especially are treated with considerable caution. Most
policemen we spoke with cite this as the main reason why any EU decisions
on making data available to police forces from states other than a carefully
selected batch of trusted ones would prove difficult to implement even
when the political pressure to comply is enormous. A case in point is Europol, a Europe-wide agency specifically set up to advance transnational information sharing and police co-operation. Politicians and high-ranking
civil servants wanted to create a central data system to analyse key criminal
and terrorist threats. In practice, police departments in most member states
deliver too little data too late for the system to get up and running. They just
dont do it, observed a recently retired Dutch policeman who had spent
years at Europol, and this is a source of enormous frustration to the management board of Europol.
The bumpy road of Europols efforts to advance information sharing and
its own stifled institutional development testify to an iron law of police cooperation: police officers need to feel an operational urgency (and payoff) to
co-operate, and to be able to trust one another. If one of these is so much as
ambiguous, they wont move whatever is being decided in Brussels and
national capitals. This is worsened by practices at Europols Management
Board. There has been little interest in Europol among the Dutch police; it
is only recently that one of the regional police chiefs took up the task of representing the Dutch police force at Europols Management Board. The chair
of the Dutch delegation is the head of a department at the Ministry of Justice. By way of an example, we recount the second day of a two-day meeting
of Europols Management Board in The Hague. It started at 10:00 a.m. with
a closed session on who should be formally proposed to the JHA Council as
a replacement for one of the deputy directors of Europol. Only delegation
leaders were allowed into the conference room. The rest of the delegation
members were waiting outside in the lounge. The Dutch delegation had
four members waiting outside. At 11:30 there was a coffee break and the del-
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egation leader mentioned that the discussion regarding the first candidate
of three was still going on. Representatives of some member states were
quarrelling despite intensive diplomacy and agreements earlier. At 13:00,
there was another break, now for lunch. Discussion began again at 14:00
and finally at 15:00 the closed session was finished. As was noted by one
of the delegation members during the closed session, after about half an
hour, some participants were already beginning to leave the meeting in
order to be able to catch their planes at Schiphol airport to be able to get back
home that same day. At 17:00, when the chair finally wanted to discuss and
confirm the minutes of the last meeting, there were not enough participants left to have a quorum.
Co-operation on the ground: Euregional policing

Yet another transnational site where data availability is considered to be
pivotal is in the so-called Euregions: border areas where, for example,
police officials from the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany collaborate
closely to combat transborder organised crime. These policemen are in the
thick of that fight and they consider the sharing of information about criminals and criminal acts with their foreign colleagues essential to making any
headway. They dont care about legal niceties, they want workable procedures. They are convinced that it is impossible to design these for 25 member states simultaneously, as the working group meeting attendees often
attempt to do. Instead, they have formed experimental multinational
teams with their neighbouring colleagues to find out what is possible, legally speaking, and what works for them. They have formed units like the
Bureau of Euregional Co-operation in Maastricht in which the judicial base
for this co-operation is laid out and a unit called Epic in which police representatives from the above-noted three countries work to accommodate information requests from their partners.
Epic is located in Heerlen, a city near Maastricht. It is a pretty unique situation. There is no fixed hierarchical structure. The rules of the game evolve
as they go along. Representatives from Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands sit around large round tables in mixed groups with computer screens
in front of them. Instead of formally processing information requests, they
just ask for the necessary information across the table. Legal experts are
available to handle the requests for legal assistance from other countries.
The linguistic mechanics of making it work are fascinating. The Dutch in
Limburg, located in the southern part of the country, speak a dialect that
resembles German. The Dutch, German and Flemish-speaking Belgian
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policemen communicate with each other in German or Dutch dialect. The

French-speaking Belgians are mostly assisted by the Flemish-speaking
Belgians, or by some of the Dutch who speak French.
One of the Dutch policemen who initiated the Euregional Bureau observed that the key ingredients for its successful launch were: practical
crime-fighting expertise, personal relationships, intercultural respect, a
sense of urgency to make a difference in tackling universally abhorred
crimes such as child pornography, and the ability to align working methods
across borders. Seen from up close, Epics everyday practices are still quite
mundane. About 80 % of its work remains confined to responding to simple requests like identifying car owners by checking licence plates. Moreover, cops from one country are not legally allowed to search each others
data systems. Once this changes, Epic must gear up to the much more complicated task of not only rapidly delivering information on request, but also
analysing the available information in the more than 90 data banks it can
then access. Its current staff mostly officers who have left operational
service because of one issue or another is hardly up to that. But the ambition is clearly there, as is the knowledge that the current political mood information sharing is widely advocated as a pivotal component in the wars
on crime and terrorism is ticking in Epics favour.
4.3 Species of Eurocrats

The case of data availability illustrates that European governance or Europeanised policy-making is produced in a series of loosely coupled arenas,
whose participants are not necessarily aware of their counterparts existence, postures and decisions. Nor are they always well-informed about the
bigger institutional configuration in which these are embedded. Working
on European data availability and police co-operation mobilises very different sorts of national civil servants driven by different rationales, operating
in different European arenas, often with considerable discretion, employing different notions of the rules of the game in doing police co-operation.
The data availability case and many others like it suggest that conventional accounts describing it as governing by committee (Christiansen and
Kirchner 2000) and expertocracy, where policies are crafted by epistemic
communities of experts (Haas 1992) are only partially correct. It would be
more accurate to describe EU governance as evolving through multiple,
loosely coupled, multi-level networks (cf. Egeberg, Schaeffer and Trondal
2003).
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EU working groups and committees certainly constitute focal points for

crafting European policies. They are multinational settings in which national civil servants operate as both policy experts and representatives of
their countries, and in that way, as the new diplomats mentioned in chapter
1. Although the policies they agree on are post-national in the sense that
these are more than just piling up national policies and regulations, the policy process through which they arrive at this is multinational (Thedvall
2006). Although working groups and committees are often said to be about
experts talking to experts, our observations and interviews in this case in the
intergovernmental setting of the Third Pillar strongly suggest that they still
are first and foremost about countries talking to countries, through their
representatives.
The multinational perspective is being reinforced by the rituals that are
performed during the meetings. As we saw, for example, participants are referred to not by their own names but by their countrys. Some representatives seek coalitions with others in order to get the meeting to adopt the policies or regulations they prefer. This is not only done during the official
meetings, but also during lunches, dinners and coffee breaks: these constitute the backstage of European committee governance, which is much
more intense in First Pillar affairs than in the Third Pillar. Sometimes representatives get together in the evening before the meeting with the intention of preparing for the meeting and forming allegiances. Sometimes they
sound one another out by e-mail or telephone calls prior to the meetings.
The national outlook of Eurocrats dominates not only their encounters
with their counterparts in working groups and committees; it also governs
their relations with the primary representatives of a post-national logic of
European policy-making: Commission officials. Representatives of member states come in with a focus on their national interests and somehow
have to arrive at post-national policies through deliberative and negotiating
processes. This can be time-consuming, and the compromises and package
deals that emerge from it may produce watered down policies that satisfy
no-one. The Commission wants to maintain speed and focus in the policymaking process by intervening in the discussions in working groups and
delivering a steady stream of post-national proposals, which representatives of member states in this setting time and again interpret as attempts to
control their national affairs.
National Eurocrats experience a dilemma in these situations. Some of
our Dutch interviewees expressed a sense of despair at the predictable and
stifling way in which all representatives of member states seem to only want
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to agree upon policies that fit their national systems. They detest the conservatism that it breeds, as one of them labelled it. However, at the same
time, they remain trapped in doing exactly the same thing themselves. At
the end of the day, they too define their professional success in terms of getting their national positions passed and at the very least of preventing
them from being disregarded altogether. After all, this is what they are held
accountable for by their peers and in their national back offices. And so they
too display a reluctance to embrace truly post-national solutions, and play
the tedious game of multinational bargaining instead.
So far so good. But to leave it like this would obscure as much as it reveals
about how Dutch officials do their European business. The various Dutch
policing Eurocrats we studied were engaged in rather different types of
international transactions. The nature of what it was they co-operated on
across borders seemed to reflect the kinds of transnational network
arrangements in which they did so.
Bureaucrat-diplomats
Take the data availability issue that was just presented above. The Brussels
Working Party on Police Co-operation and the CATS committee represent
what we could call bureaucratic-diplomatic arenas of making European policy. The craft of the Eurocrats that populate these arenas revolves around
two stages: first, as bureaucrats at home, they need to construct a national
position out of often heterogeneous sets of views and preferences of various
(sub-)departmental and other stakeholders (i.e., the police), often without
any clear political positions steering them; then, as diplomats, they need
to represent and defend those national positions whilst bargaining with
representatives from other member states. To some this is simple stuff.
One Ministry of Justice official boasted:
Working in EU settings is actually very straightforward. Everybody
knows this but it is rarely ever said aloud. When you go to Brussels you
say to your colleagues at home: It will be tough to achieve this. When
you are in Brussels you tell your fellow committee members: I must
be able to sell this at home. And so you always have an explanation for
the result you achieve.
The bureaucratic-diplomatic view of Eurocratic work corresponds closely to
the traditional picture of the EU as a multilevel system of committee governance. We found it to be prevalent among two groups of Dutch officials.
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Firstly, among ministry officials of the kind called policy bureaucrats by

Page and Jenkins (2005): academically-trained professionals charged with
policy development and maintenance in particular issue areas. Their involvement in European policy processes flows from their portfolio responsibilities and is issue-based, sporadic and often does not constitute a major
part of their working week. They are not specifically interested in EU institutions and processes, nor have they received any formal training in their
modus operandi. They are just following their dossiers to preparatory
meetings within and between Dutch ministries, and occasionally to expert
or working group meetings in Brussels. To many, acting on the European
stage may be a regular, but quite often an infrequent, part of their jobs. Nor
is it necessarily the most important part of their jobs. Much depends, as always, on the priority given to the topic by the departmental hierarchy.
In many cases, these policy bureaucrats are not particularly well-prepared for the new world they are about to enter when they are first assigned
EU-related tasks. We cite two voices from a much bigger chorus:
They just let you go to Brussels. It isnt a very structured thing. You just
go there and begin to operate. You learn by doing, and by observing
others doing it.
And:
I stumbled into the European scene in 1985 because my portfolio
required me to attend meetings in Brussels. Your older colleagues
or your head of unit would give you some coaching. They would come
with you once or twice and after that it was youre on your own now
good luck with it.
Some of these officials may continue to be charged with European portfolios for long periods of time. In the organisations studied, this was far more
likely to happen to officials at the Agriculture and Justice Ministries than to
their colleagues at the Interior and Health Ministries. Those that do build
up considerable experience in the dos and donts of operating in Brussels.
Taken together, this constitutes a potentially valuable body of rules of
thumb and survival techniques that does not seem to get codified and
transmitted systematically from EU veterans to EU novices within the various departments. People are sent to courses at the Dutch Institute of International Affairs (Clingendael) or the National Government Training Insti-
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tute (ROI). This is deemed useful by many to get a grip on the institutional
framework of the EU, learn about intercultural negotiation and so on. Such
formal training remains useful even for those with hands-on experience, as
one official confirmed:
After two years on the Brussels circuit I went to the Dutch Institute of
International Affairs to do a course. It was interesting to finally get the
bigger picture about the entire EU project how all the pieces of the
puzzle are supposed to fit. If you are only attending committee meetings you dont grasp this at all.
The second group which practices and espouses the bureaucratic-diplomatic view of Eurocratic work are the EU insiders: EU co-ordinators at
ministries, officials attached to the Permanent Representation, and highlevel officials who chair delegations at high-level meetings. For all the differences between their average working days, all of these people describe
their work as proceeding in a more-or-less scripted, predictable fashion.
Theirs is the world of institutionalised bargaining both at home and in
multilateral forums. In that world, which they regard as not very unlike that
of other multilateral institutions such as the UN or the WTO, the scope of
the possible is determined by existing treaties, agreements and regulatory
frameworks, as well as by balances of power, veto players and coalitions.
Knowledge about these things tends to be widely shared among the participants, all socialised over time to become EU insiders.
Being effective in this world, these civil servants maintain, requires astute anticipation of the institutional balance between Council, Commission, Parliament and member states. Preparatory work may also involve
massaging key gatekeepers within EU institutions, particularly Commission policy bureaucrats who are shaping the proposals, but also pivotal
MEPs. More generally, it requires smart venue shopping within these constituent forces: talking to the right people in the right bodies at the right time
in the right way. The actual EU working group, committee and Council
meetings are seen as pivotal occasions for bargaining and issue-by-issue
coalition building that build on this preparatory work. Those who do their
homework well ought not to be surprised by what transpires there, and they
should be well-placed to shape their decision-making processes, if only by
short-circuiting them in advance (as became clear in some of the examples
we gave above). By virtue of their institutional and tactical know-how, EU insiders are ideally able to foresee how particular issues will play out, and take
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timely action to steer the process in desired directions. However, the sheer
complexity of the processes involved makes the fool-proof prediction and
control of the policy process difficult to achieve.
Departmental co-ordination bureaucrats

In the domestic back office of EU policy-making, Eurocratic work boils
down to aligning departmental and interdepartmental policy co-ordination
to the rhythms, procedures and routines of scheduled EU meetings. In
these preparatory meetings, the national interest, and therefore the national position on any given topic on the EU agenda, gets defined. Civil servants attending these preparatory meetings formulate what the national interest is, often in the absence of clearly articulated ministerial preferences,
let alone cabinet policy. They are flying blindly quite a lot of the time.
On touchy topics like data availability and information sharing in the
criminal justice field, ministers do formulate opinions, but on politically
less salient issues, civil servants at the meeting construct a national perspective all by themselves. They brief Dutch delegation leaders in the working group or committee in Brussels on these positions. Delegation leaders
then make their own judgements on how to interpret the instruction; they
know full well that much of what The Hague feeds them does not come
straight from the top, and thus can be taken with a grain of salt.
Discretion is the name of the game in this process. A representative in
the Multidisciplinary Working Group on Organised Crime observed:
Often it is individuals themselves who determine the national position. I think that is weird. If something does not have a fire-alarm
character or very high priority you can decide yourself what to do. [The
delegation leader] does that a lot of the time. But he also discusses it.
When he decided to no longer defend a certain position in CATS, he
came by to tell me. That was a unique occasion. Generally you never
hear about anything again ... In the international arena, your autonomy is bigger than in the national arena. That is because it has less
priority. The national and the international are completely separated.
A Head of Delegation to one of the committees echoed this observation:
You must know your instructions well, but you should also know the
entire process that produced the instructions in order to gauge the
weight of the various interests involved. You try to achieve your in-
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structions, and if thats impossible, you try to at least achieve its bottom line. However, the instructions are often useless, frankly. The official who actually attends the working group knows its dynamics best.
You must not lose out on the really vital issues. You have a lot of discretion, but you must of course anticipate The Hagues reactions.
The co-ordinators at ministries are at the hub of this process of defining
positions, drafting instructions and monitoring outcomes. As one puts it:
Most EU dossiers touch upon the work of two or more parts of this
ministry: the EUs way of dividing up policy issues does not correspond perfectly with the Dutch departmental division of labour. There
is a need for a sorting station. Thats what we do.
In some ministries (Justice, Agriculture) these units provide a comprehensive, centralised system of co-ordinating EU policy matters across the full
range of the ministrys portfolio. Others, such as the Ministry of the Interior, have opted for a more hybridised system where a central co-ordination
unit focuses on procedural matters, whereas the international units of the
policy or executive sections deal more closely with the substantive preparation of meetings in specific issue areas (such as policing and intelligence).
Meanwhile, others, such as the Ministry of Health, have no such co-ordination unit at all. The domestic EU affairs co-ordinators we encountered seem
to agree that two things are particularly important in their jobs. The first is
getting those that matter in ones own department to grant appropriate priority to the issues. This may be an uphill struggle, however. In the four ministries examined here, differences in ministerial involvement were marked:
low, passive and almost non-existent in Health and Interior; the opposite in
Agriculture and Justice. When ministers have other priorities, the ministrys top officials tend to have the same priorities.
The second part of a co-ordinators job is to develop a clearly articulated
departmental position on any given issue, and make sure this position carries weight in interdepartmental co-ordination processes prior to EU meetings. Bureaucratic politics does not stop at the border and the domestic coordination of EU policy is a well-known bureaucratic battleground in many
countries (Kassim et al. 2000). The Netherlands is certainly no exception to
this rule; its ministries are large and internally heterogeneous; joined-up
government has proven an elusive ideal at best; and the machinery of interdepartmental co-ordination of EU affairs has been the subject of repeated
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investigations, discussions and tugs of war between the Foreign Ministry

and the Prime Ministers office.
The run-up to high-level European meetings are like any other policy issue
of significance and rife with interdepartmental scuffles:
We at the Ministry of the Interior often prepare texts to be delivered by
our minister at the JHA Council. Sometimes our minister decides not
to attend the meeting because of time constraints when some of the
decisions are in the domain of the Ministry of the Interior. Instead, he
leaves it up to the Minister of Justice to represent us. The Minister of
Justice always does a very good job. He is very much internationally
oriented, and communicates well with his foreign colleagues. But it
ultimately weakens the position of the Ministry of the Interior vis--vis
the Ministry of Justice.
Those who sit in the hot seat as delegation leaders in Brussels obviously
have leverage over the other departments and other stakeholders whose
interests are at stake in these meetings. That is why interdepartmental sensitivities like the one mentioned above develop. Ministries with top-ranking
officers who do not give high priority to European issues tend to be on the
losing end of the interdepartmental scuffles. It is hard for the EU co-ordinators in these ministries to get their organisations voice heard in the interdepartmental preparations for EU meetings. They lack their own prize fighters who can be brought into the ring when other departments attempt to
usurp power, e.g., by securing Head of Delegation spots in crucial EU committees and working groups, and by dominating the crafting of Dutch positions on important issues.
Street-level entrepreneurs
How different is the world of the other kinds of Eurocrats we encountered.
In general, they were people whose main orientation is their own profession, whose natural habitat is the operational practices in the field (i.e.,
street-level), and whose main drive is to have themselves heard on the international/European stage, ultimately to solve the practical problems they
encountered in these practices in whichever way that works.
The function of Eurocrats is experienced quite differently by those who
work in the Euregional Bureau. The employees there have an entrepreneurial perspective, which involves forging street-level co-operation to solve
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pressing problems in public service delivery. Entrepreneurial Eurocrats focus on the establishment of transborder investigations, enforcement measures and officer training programmes.
The dichotomy of national versus post-national identities (with traces of
departmental identities) that bureaucrat-diplomats struggle with does not
fully capture the role orientation of these operational practitioners because
they are, above all, experts in their field. Technical knowledge and professional skills are their stock-in-trade, and form the primary lens through
which they view and assess their foreign counterparts and the possibilities
for co-operative ventures. Combining an experts knowledge with a zealots
drive in a context of at best embryonic European institutions and policies
that circumscribe and define what needs to be done and how can go a long
way toward helping a national Eurocrat shape specific policies with a small
group of kindred spirits. When we asked Police Commissioner Ad Hellemons, Director of European Affairs of the Transport Police Division of the
Dutch National Police Agency, to describe a typical working day on the European circuit he picked a particular day and recounted:
My alarm clock goes off at 3 a.m. I live in the western part of Brabant (in
the southwestern region of the Netherlands) and can hop in and out of
Paris in a day. I am in my car half an hour later and arrive in Paris in
time to beat the rush hour. I reach the Gendarmeries headquarters
well in time to share a coffee with the officers on duty in the Generals
secretariat. I know them from previous encounters and, since I am
reasonably fluent in French, I can chat a bit with them to get a sense of
the days mood. I visit the French to get them to commit to certain new
TISPOL [see box] initiatives. I helped found TISPOL and was president of it for many years. When I arrive I know that my immediate
counterpart in the French traffic police division is already on board,
but French hierarchy requires that the matter be taken up by the very
top before anything can happen. I know I have to begin my conversation with the General in such a way as to enable him to conduct himself
in French without having to draw attention to his limited fluency in
English. That hurdle taken, we make some small talk. Then I gently
steer the conversation toward the topic at hand. I stress the pivotal importance of French leadership, you know, the stuff he likes to hear. In
fact, it is not all that difficult to get people like the General to co-operate. They know I am not a loose cannon. TISPOL has a good reputation
because, since its inception, the number of road deaths in Europe has
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been falling dramatically. An hour later, my business is done. I hit the

road and Im back home in the early afternoon.
Hellemons epitomises the ideal type of other Eurocrat: the doers, the experimenters, the rule-benders, the venue-shoppers. People like him have
been the most conspicuous in the police co-operation field, which consists
of police commissioners and public prosecutors in areas along the borders,
narcotics and road safety specialists and police educators. The open, not yet
highly institutionalised, non-supranational structure of Third Pillar policymaking invites this kind of behaviour. Officials of this ilk are mainly people
driven to reduce transborder threats to safety affecting day-to-day operations of their police forces, issues they could not possibly tackle all by themselves. They need information and collaboration from foreign colleagues to
enable them to do their core business. Unlike the bureaucrat-diplomats in
TISPOL Mission Statement

The TISPOL Organisation has been established by the traffic police forces of
Europe in order to improve road safety and law enforcement on European
roads. Our main priority is to reduce the number of people being killed and
seriously injured on Europes roads. We believe the enforcement of traffic
law and education, where appropriate, will make a significant contribution to
reducing the carnage on our roads. This is evident in a number of TISPOL
member countries.
The objectives of TISPOL
1. To reduce road deaths and casualties on European Roads.
2. To bring together the Roads and Traffic Police Forces in Europe to work together and exchange best practices.
3. Organising and co-ordinating pan-European operations and campaigns.
4. To encourage enforcement and education based on research, intelligence
and information so as to establish an effective and targeted education and
enforcement programme.
5. Initiating and supporting research on road safety.
6. Providing an informed and co-ordinated police opinion on road safety issues.
Source: www.tispol.org/about
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ministerial back offices and at the Permanent Representation, co-operation

for them is a means to a clear end rather than a generic, ongoing task of
managing Dutch participation in the EU committee system and working
groups.
TISPOL is the focus of Ad Hellemons Eurocratic entrepreneurship and has
been by all accounts very successful. He explained how this came to pass:
The problem of transportation policing in Europe is that roads and mobility policy is made by our cousins in the First Pillar, whereas our family
inhabits the Third Pillar. This implies that the policy and rules the transport police are supposed to enforce are made in the First Pillar, without
any participation by the enforcers. That Third Pillar is a monstrosity because of its unanimity rule and a serious lack of interest in policing matters. If it is not about terrorism or organised crime, they tend to ignore it,
but the reality is that no less than 30% of police officers available time in
Europe is involved in traffic one way or another. Contact between the First
and Third pillar on this issue is non-existent. When decisions are made
in your absence, all that is left for you to do as a police organisation is to
clear up the mess afterwards, for instance, having to enforce policies that
are basically unenforceable or downright self-defeating. The activities of
these two pillars should be linked, but that wasnt happening. And so we
as representatives of the traffic police forces have drawn an arrow from
the Third to the First Pillar. That arrow constitutes my role orientation
we have set up three different networks, but the largest and most developed of them is TISPOL. It has members from all of the EU states on
board as well as several candidate states and Switzerland and Norway. It is
fully financed by First Pillar money for me it means a lot of driving.
Trips like the one to Paris. They are about making contact, looking the
other guy in the eye and using old contacts as stepping stones for making
new ones. This network has now been established and is fully financed by
the Commission. It is officially a British foundation and we have a president, financial director and an executive board. I am the executive director. The owners are comprised of all the participating police forces. We
have five working groups for exchanging information, developing joint
training programs, developing pilot projects and reporting systems, and
planning joint operations. We are quite operational. We run 50 to 60 panEuropean enforcement operations per year To fund various projects,
we compete for Commission money by submitting proposals. We main-
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tain good contacts with Commission officials and have had about 19 of
our proposals funded.
Q: How did you get into the Commission with this project?
Its very simple, you check on the Web who is dealing with traffic safety issues and you walk in. To give you an idea, there are only seven people in
the entire Commission involved in road transport issues and they all sit
in adjacent rooms. Each of them is happy to do business with you. We
feed them ideas and proposals that help them achieve their stated Commission objectives in this policy domain, which is to reduce road deaths
in Europe by 50% by 2010. The Commission drafted this on paper but
had no idea how to implement it At that time we stepped in and the
Commission discovered that it needed the police, and needed the knowhow from certain countries. And things are marching along beautifully
now. We are now at the midway point on our timeline and we are right on
schedule. And this is about a structural annual reduction in the number
of road deaths of no less than 11,000.
TISPOLs director is clearly a man with a mission: to reduce traffic deaths
and casualties by beefing up prevention and enforcement on a pan-European scale. Operational necessity got it established, but trust among professionals across borders is what makes it tick. The same goes for all of the
other police co-operation networks we studied. With some trust, they can be
vibrant, as in the case of Epic described above. But when trust is lacking, as
in the Europol case, then progress will remain limited. The following exchange with another senior Dutch police officer highlights this:
Q: Is there such a thing as a policy framework that dictates whether or not you
engage in co-operation with police forces from other countries?
Yes. It is very simple: do you trust someone or not? It begins with the people involved, and only after that it becomes a matter of organisations or
countries.
Q: What must I do to gain your trust?
Be open and transparent. You get to know people through international
committees and networks. It all starts with interpersonal relationships.
Q: This trust appears to be very personal. Isnt there some sort of guideline?
There is a kind of division, for example through Interpol: we do business
with so and so, and not with these others there is a list of this kind. But
most of it is individual. You look at the quality of democracy in the other
persons country and all that.
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Q: What is the ultimate aim for the Dutch police when it comes to international
police co-operation?
It would be good if policemen and the mayors and public prosecutors
who work with them accept international co-operation as something selfevident. This implies that they should also be convinced that they should
devote time to it and be courageous in doing it. It means they will co-operate on the basis of solid agreements and institutionalised trust. Most of
all, it is about co-operation becoming something that can be taken for
granted.
Street-level entrepreneurs have no intrinsic commitment to the EU project
and its main institutions. They try to work through these institutions, but
often run up against legal and political constraints. This is especially relevant in the Third Pillar, where the development of EU-wide co-operation is
slow and the main advocate for truly post-national policies, the Commission, occupies a weaker position vis--vis the member states. Street-level
Eurocrats in this domain are constantly confronted by the gap between their
felt needs for deeper co-operation and the murky realities of EU practices:
they want things for which there are no policies in place yet. Their coping
strategy is one of circumvention: bypassing the obstacles of working within
the EU institutions by developing alternative forms of co-operation, showing that these do the job, and over time, trying to integrate them into the EU
mainstream.
They tend to strive for autonomy, and regard the role of ministries as gatekeepers to participation in relevant EU networks as unhelpful meddling in
affairs that could more effectively be settled among professionals. One police chief said:
I dont think that the current governments orientation on putting
the citizens first by letting the professionals do their job is properly
safeguarded by having us represented in Brussels predominantly by
departmental bureaucrats. They are not sufficiently on top of the substance of the issues, which can be quite intricate. It is easy to get it
wrong or gloss over the important details if youre not a professional
yourself. Besides, it is much easier to build transnational rapport
among professionals in a particular field.
They are not comfortable with the world of instructions, mandates, interdepartmental co-ordination, procedural intricacies, forced inclusiveness and
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logrolling strategies that is part and parcel of the bureaucrat-diplomats

co-operation paradigm.
They instead prefer to build co-operation from the ground up by nurturing personal and professional networks and creating prototypes of practical
joint problem-solving that work. One police commissioner put it so eloquently that it is worth quoting him at length:
Since the process of developing European regulations is so extraordinarily time-consuming in the Third Pillar, we at the operational level
simply need to create movement in smaller entities. You must, of
course, respect state sovereignty and all that, but within these boundaries you must create facts. Take the example of joint hitting in serious crime investigations: we first formed a cross-border team and only
asked for The Hagues permission to do so after the fact In a way it is
all about seduction. Take a concrete shared headache first. You start
with sharing information. You start small: concrete and feasible projects. And you take safe forms of co-operation first, such as liaison officers and joint education and training. Then you just happen to organise a conference with your partners from other countries, and then
you get the ball rolling The trick is to transpose the operational sense
of urgency towards the strategic level, the politicians and the very top
of the civil service. If at all possible I try to keep the tactical level of middle-level officials out of it, since they tend to be the ones producing all
the hurdles. They are more engaged in fighting one another about
who gets to head the delegation to the Brussels committees than in
facilitating practical co-operation. They are like a thick, impenetrable
layer of clay that mutes every movement They have another set of
roles and responsibilities than we do. They are there to safeguard the
uniformity and coherence of Dutch law and policy; we represent the
voice of professional service delivery to citizens. And it is a pity that our
voice does not get heard directly enough in Brussels. This is why we
are lobbying hard to establish a national Police House in Brussels.
We number 54,000 policemen and women in this country; if we are
not prepared to invest in freeing up some 100 to 150 of them to deal
with international co-operation and EU affairs in all their various
manifestations, we will simply end up missing the boat.
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4.4 Understanding national Eurocrats: Conclusions

In this chapter, we have studied Dutch Eurocrats in the field of European police co-operation in order to understand the worlds they work in, and how
they define and do their work. We suspected that in the relatively open institutional environment of a Third Pillar sector such as police co-operation,
Eurocratic work is less focused on influencing the European Commission
and the drafting of its policy proposals than in a First Pillar sector such as
veterinary policy, as the Commission has little scope for such initiatives under the Third Pillar. So getting things done must entail a different type of
craft, to be practised in different types of arenas. The research reported in
this chapter bears out this expectation. It does, however, yield a varied picture there is no single, shared notion of Europeanpolicy-makingand Eurocratic work in this sector, there are multiple views which co-exist. Strategic behaviour on the part of member state officials is certainly part of this,
but it takes rather different forms than the tactics described in chapter 3 on
veterinary Eurocrats.
Looking closely at the world of police co-operation, we distilled three
quite distinct logics of Eurocratic work (see table 4.1). In seeking an answer
to our first research question, we found civil servants operating in different
ways in different European arenas. We found bureaucrat-diplomats at the
ministries, as well as in working groups and committees in Brussels, bargaining about national positions. We found street-level entrepreneurs
building transnational coalitions of the willing, as they are confronted with
transnational crime. And we found departmental co-ordinators focused
on making sure the machinery of the domestic preparation of EU policy
processes continues to function smoothly. These are, of course, stylised,
ideal-typical pictures, whereas real-life officials may display these traits to
different degrees and in all sorts of hybrid combinations. But we think the
distinction is useful for analytical and policy purposes.
In part, these different role conceptions simply reflect individual differences, and differences between policy bureaucrats and operational doers. But they are also shaped by the differentiated nature of the European
polity. European governance is produced in bundles of very different types
of policy networks of new diplomats, depending on the nature of the collaborative challenge at hand (such as exchange, regulation and enforcement; see Slaughter 2004), the institutional context in which joint action
is being shaped (e.g., the position of the issue area in the EU Pillar structure), the level of action involved (policy-making versus operational col-
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Departmental
co-ordination bureaucrats
Bureaucrat-diplomats
Street-level entrepreneurs
Natural habitat
Departmental working
groups and interdepartmental meetings of European co-ordinators.
Formal working parties and

committees and national
preparatory process.
Networks in which information and good practices are

exchanged and which
strengthen enforcement.
Role orientations
Organising and co-ordinating departmental input and

interdepartmental consensus in the preparation of EU
meetings. Dominant identity: Dutch civil servant.
Preparing and representing

national positions in multilateral forums, and selling the
EU in their own home departments. Dominant identity:
departmental civil servant.
Operational problem
solving. Dominant identity:
balancing act between
Dutch civil servant and
transnational area expert.
Activity and
contact patterns
Centred around the roster

of (inter)departmental
preparatory meetings in
anticipation of scheduled
EU working group and committee meetings. Consultation with departmental
liaison officers at Dutch
Permanent Representation.
Centred around scheduled

national preparatory meetings and scheduled EU-level
working group and committee meetings.
Developing contacts and

networks as the need arises
and the opportunities for
joint action present themselves.
Arenas and
channels
Mainly domestic-bureaucratic.
Mainly formal EU forums.
Mainly emergent joint

ventures.
Measures of
quality and
effectiveness
Arriving at agreed-upon,
coherent and timely Dutch
initiatives and policy positions prior to EU meetings.
Shaping EU agendas and

achieving EU policies in
accordance with previously
agreed-upon Dutch
preferences.
Achieving tangible
operational successes.
Knowledge and
expertise
Knowledge of departmental Knowledge of formal and

and interdepartmental EU- informal rules of the game
related actors and arenas. in the EU system.
Knowledge of formal and
informal rules of the game
in the EU system.
Balancing the relative
weight and priority of
multiple EU dossiers.
Classic diplomatic skills

(intercultural empathy,
language, negotiation,
networking etc.).
Broad transborder and/or

transnational network in
own professional domain.
Knowing where to get

money and how to overcome potential obstacles
Broad network across the vari- in EU system.
ous EU institutions, particularly Commission and EP.
Ability to capture ministerial

and top management
Bureau-political skills and
attention for participation clout in the domestic preparain EU meetings.
tory co-ordination process.
Sound grasp of issue
substances.
Table 4.1 Dutch Eurocrats: three ideal types
100 the new eurocrats
Professional know-how.
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laboration), and the need to prepare domestically for positions taken internationally.
Different European action channels pose different demands on national
Eurocrats. And so, when compared to the old and deeply institutionalised
world of EU veterinary policy as described in chapter 3 or the equally scripted world of the Brussels committee system, there are relatively few precedents and rules to observe for those involved in developing European police
co-operation from the ground up. In that arena there is considerable scope
for bottom-up agenda-setting and experimentation. There are no fixed allegiances; the challenge is to build coalitions of the willing and find resources
to get them going. So, this is part of the answer to the second research question we posed: the way in which European work is organisationally embedded and facilitated is hugely differentiated.
Moreover, co-ordination bureaucrats and bureaucrat-diplomats, on the one
hand, and street level-entrepreneurs, on the other, clearly inhabit different
worlds. Street level-entrepreneurs complain about departmental co-ordinators and bureaucrat-diplomats knowing too little about the real work
(which is about preventing crime and catching criminals in whichever way
works); co-ordination bureaucrats and bureaucrat-diplomats complain that
street level-entrepreneurs allow tunnel vision and zealotry to disrupt the
even-handed development of policy across the full range of dossiers that together constitute the police co-operation portfolio.
Whereas departmental co-ordinators focus on sustaining smooth and
timely consultation procedures, bureaucrat-diplomats are preoccupied
with articulating and defending the national point of view in multilateral forums, and operational zealots seek to create vehicles for practical transborder co-operation in a truly post-national fashion. The latters sense of interdependence is strong, simply because the nature of the phenomena they
deal with makes it impossible to belie this. Treading cautiously in the formal
EU committee settings is not for them, and they seek to work around them.
One way to do so is to draw on the ambitions and the financial resources of
the European Commission to gain support for smaller-scale experiments.
A related way involves building informal coalitions of the willing to find
out if and how new forms of co-operation across borders can be made to
work, both on the ground and in legal terms. In doing so, they hope to create
irreversible facts. The Bureau of Euregional Co-operation in Maastricht described above is one such attempt.
Currently, street-level entrepreneurs rather than bureaucrat-diplomats
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(or departmental co-ordinators) are the main engines of co-operation and

integration in the police co-operation dossier. This may not last. Paradoxically, highly dynamic and successful street-level entrepreneurs, to some extent, sow the seeds of their own demise. As the operational practices they
create become more visible and elaborate, pressures to formalise, regulate,
and embed them in EU-wide institutional arrangements will grow. To make
sure these formalisation processes unfold in desired directions is not something that street-level entrepreneurs are inclined or indeed equipped to do.
It will be up to their bureaucratic-diplomatic counterparts to secure and
consolidate the fruits of their labour.
Some bureaucrat-diplomats go even further. They are no longer only inclined to produce new rules and regulations, but show a growing awareness
that it is part of the problem in police co-operation that for every problem
new regulation is decided on. These new bureaucrat-diplomats are aware
that to facilitate police co-operation in a way that the police themselves perceive as useful, devising new regulation is not enough. According to them,
national departmental officials should co-operate with the police and the
European Commission in focusing on practical aspects like facilitating the
exchange of information, producing handbooks and who-is-who lists. Perhaps they are representative of a broader phenomenon: national bureaucrat-diplomats who share the typical street-level officials sense of urgency
to beef up functional co-operation in areas where it can make a big difference, and in doing so, revitalise the European project. Some street-level
bureaucrats have expressed a similar need for these new kinds of ways of
co-operation. If their numbers increase, perhaps the various species of Eurocrats discerned in this chapter will blend into a hybrid the complete
street-level diplomat. But for the time being, the day-to-day reality of national administrations seeking to get things done in Europe will continue to
involve a delicate balancing act between the different outlooks and operating styles of bureaucrat-diplomats and street-level entrepreneurs.
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CHAPTER 5
BRIDGE BUILDERS OR BRIDGEHEADS

IN BRUSSELS? THE WORLD OF SECONDED
NATIONAL EXPERTS
By Semin Suvarierol and Caspar van den Berg 26
5.1 Living and breathing the Brussels bureaucracy

The foregoing chapters have demonstrated the extent to which national civil servants are involved in EU-related activities, and the dynamics of national administrative activities in the context of the EU. This chapter shifts the
focus from national civil servants working on the European Union to national civil servants working for the European Union. This is a class of national civil servants for whom finding a balance between national and European interests in their work is a permanent, although sometimes implicit,
feature of their daily professional activities. The duality of national and European roles is perhaps the most exacerbated for the seconded national experts (SNEs, see also chapter 3), national civil servants who are temporarily
working for EU institutions, in particular those seconded to the European
Commission.27 On the one hand, Commission SNEs have to be loyal to the
Commission and represent European interests in this supranational organ
of the EU, while on the other hand, their employer remains the member
state government, and they are thus expected to return to their home organisation after their secondment term ends. Therefore, the SNEs are practically torn between two employers: their daily employer under whose supervision they work (the Commission) and the national employer who sent them
on the secondment and continues to pay their salaries (the member state).
Besides these atypical terms of employment, SNEs also form a particular
group of European civil servants in terms of their position at a crossing
point of European and national governance at the micro level. This key position stems mainly from their presence in the beginning phase of the EU leg-
bridge builders or bridgeheads in brussels?
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islative process by working for the Commission. As has been argued in

chapter 3, SNEs are potentially key strategic instruments for the member
states in manoeuvring policy proposals. Conversely, SNEs are key resources
for the Commission to sound out the acceptability of a particular proposal
for a given member state. This reciprocal gain, however, can only work if
there is an ongoing flow of information between the Commission and the
member state through the SNE. By virtue of the flow of information, SNEs
can play a major role in linking the European and the national level through
their networks or know-who at both levels. To the extent that these networks
are maintained, both the Commission and the member state can benefit optimally from the know-how of SNEs. Furthermore, since networks are attached to people, they can remain intact when the secondment ends, which
can make the benefits of the secondment period long-lasting. The lasting
benefits can only be reaped, however, if SNEs return to their home organisation and keep on working on Europe in positions where they can make use
of their networks.
Based on this premise, this chapter asks how the work of SNEs can be
characterised as connectors between the national and European administration: they utilise their networks, rather as bridge builders between the
Commission and the member state, or do they primarily act as national
bridgeheads in the supranational Commission arena? Answers to a number
of sub-questions are necessary to arrive at this insight:
To what extent do the SNEs rely on their national networks during
their secondment?
For what purposes do they use their networks?
Do these networks endure? In other words, to what extent do the SNEs
rely on their European network upon their return?
To what extent does the Dutch government exert substantive influence
through its SNEs (by means of signalling and frontloading)?
To what extent is a period of secondment with the European Commission a route for career advancement for Dutch civil servants?
The remainder of this chapter is organised as follows: First, the methodology and empirical data are presented. A short discussion of the secondment
system will be followed by some remarks concerning the particularities of
the Netherlands as a supplier of SNEs. We will review the answers to our
questions and make conclusions by reflecting on the implications of our
findings for the effective use of SNEs as a strategic tool (as implied in chapter 3).
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5.2 Getting inside the insiders: Methodology and data

Empirical research focusing on seconded national experts is rare. The
growing significance of SNEs within the Commission has only recently received attention in the literature, namely through the work of Jarle Trondal
(2004, 2006a, 2006b). Trondal was the first scholar to collect data on SNEs.
The sample of respondents he uses in his work includes mainly Swedish
and Norwegian SNEs, and his work analyses the identities and allegiances
of these officials. We chose to concentrate on national experts from one
member state and arrive at valid results for this specific group. This also allowed us to explore to what extent SNEs fulfil their dual role of carrying expertise from the member state to the Commission and from the Commission back to the member state.
The Netherlands presents an interesting case in this regard. Not only did
it long enjoy a reputation as an enthusiastic subscriber to the ideal of an integrated Europe, but as one of the founding members of the European
Union it is a longstanding player in the secondment system. Secondly, its
modest size makes it possible for researchers to identify and reach the entire population of current SNEs and a considerable share of the population
of former SNEs for the period between 2001 and 2005 (56%) with relative
ease. Our dataset is composed of 90 Dutch national experts divided into two
groups: one group of officials who are currently working as SNEs at the
European Commission and one group of former SNEs who were seconded
between 2001 and 2005.28 For both groups of respondents, we collected
survey and interview data. The survey and interview questions have been
adapted from Trondals SNE studies to Dutch SNEs. The aim of the survey
has been to obtain an overview on the networks, positions and careers of
a large group of SNEs so as to follow up with in-depth interviews with a
smaller group of SNEs on the major aspects that came to the fore through
the surveys.
The entire population of the current 62 Dutch SNEs was contacted to participate in the survey,29 out of which 46 responded to our request, resulting
in a 74% response rate. Hence we can be confident that our data for the current Dutch SNEs are representative (Babbie 1992 267). In-depth interviews
were conducted with eight of these officials, selected on the basis of the
range of responses they gave, with the aim of covering the broadest range
with a small number of respondents.
The former SNEs were reached using the snowballing method due to the
absence of complete records. Out of a population of 91 former SNEs, we
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were able to contact 51,30 and 44 of the contacted former SNEs filled in the
questionnaire (a response rate of 86%). The use of snowball rather than
random sampling does not pose great problems for interpreting the results,
since we only report frequencies, means and medians in our analysis. In
addition, 20 in-depth interviews have been conducted with this group of respondents. The item non-response rate was low for the surveys, the poorest
item score was 78 respondents. The survey questions have been streamlined to enable comparison between the two groups of SNEs. The former
SNEs have been asked questions regarding their secondment period and
their current functions to enable cross-time comparisons.31
5.3 Demand and supply: The Dutch and the expert secondment
system
The growing number of tasks accorded to the European level of governance
over the years has brought up the need for more staff, which has led the European Commission to increasingly resort to external assistance through
temporary employment arrangements, partly due to budgetary stringency
and partly to changing agendas that require extra expertise. There are
22,543 officials working for the Commission, 6,868 of whom are external
or temporary staff.32 Seconded national experts number 1,077, but their relative weight is better understood when one takes into consideration that
their number equals 9.7% of the total number of 11,052 policy officials (Administrator/A-level officials), i.e., the highest level of Commission officials.
The primary aim of the secondment system is to inject into the Commission the high level of professional knowledge in a specific area of expertise
and work experience in the member state the national experts possess,
especially in areas where such expertise is lacking within the Commissions
rank and file. The potential benefit for the national administrations in return is that SNEs increase their expertise at the European/international level while gaining insider knowledge on the institutional set-up and functioning of the EU, which, one presumes, they take back to their administrations.
SNEs are typically seconded from the administrations (national, regional
or local) of EU member states, though the Commission also recruits experts
from the private and voluntary sectors or international organisations where
their expertise is needed. SNE vacancies are usually made public by informing the Permanent Representations of member states in Brussels, which
subsequently contact the respective national authorities. The recruiting
Commission unit receives the applications of SNE candidates from the
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member states, makes a shortlist and selects an SNE, usually as a result of

an interview. The secondment lasts between six months and four years during which the SNE is remunerated by their home employer and receives
compensation from the Commission for the extra costs incurred by living
and working abroad.33 Whereas it is a relatively cheap matter to hire experts
for the Commission, Dutch government organisations, for instance, invest
an estimated total of three million euros annually through continued
salaries on seconded officials.34
From the outset, SNEs have a double allegiance: they are employees of
their home organisation (financially and officially), but they work under the
instructions of the European Commission. SNEs are obliged to behave solely in the interests of the Commission and not to accept any instructions or
duties from their home government or organisation. But they do not have
the authority to represent the Commission or to enter into any commitments on behalf of the Commission.35 This double role is further exacerbated by the fact that the entire secondment system is based on the assumption
that SNEs return to their home organisation after the termination of their
secondment. SNEs cannot escape the permanent balancing act this
arrangement entails. As one interviewee stated: The Commission is my
boss, but I will return, so I do take Dutch interests into consideration. For instance, I am careful with my criticisms of the Netherlands. On the other
hand, the more you sound like a representative of the Netherlands, the less
authority you wield in the Commission. So you have to be objective.36
The Commission is organised primarily according to sector and function, which makes it structurally comparable to a national administration.
What differentiates the Commission is its multinational staff. In order to
prevent any particular nationalities from dominating the ranks of the Commission, the organisation has from the beginning respected a geographical
balance rule whereby the number of staff employed by the Commission reflects approximately the population size to ensure a legitimate composition. Dutch officials currently make up 3.3% of the total and 4% of A-level
officials of the Commission. The Netherlands comprises 3.6% of the EU
population and 4% of the weighted Council votes. Thus, the Dutch share of
Commission officials is largely in proportion to its geographical entitlement. Until recently, however, the Netherlands was under-represented
within the Commission bureaucracy. This under-representation partially
stemmed from the fact that the entrance exam for permanent officials, the
concours, was difficult to pass for Dutch candidates because competitive examinations are fairly unknown in the Dutch educational system. This led
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POLICY
AREA
Market-oriented
Social
Regulation
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DIRECTORATEGENERAL
FREQUENCY
PERCENT
DG Competition
DG Internal Market and
Services
DG Economic and Financial Affairs
DG Enterprise
Total
DG Environment
DG Health and Consumer
Protection
DG Employment
DG Justice
DG Education and Culture
Total
9
7
4
4
24
7
5
4
4
1
21
26.7%
23.3%
Supply side
DG Transport and Energy

DG Research
DG Taxation and Customs
Union
DG Information Society and Media
Total
7
5
4
3
19
21.1%
4
2
2
2
1
11
12.2%
3
3
2
8
8.9%
5
2
7
7.8%
N= 90
100%
Administration
Eurostat
DG Budget
Secretariat-General
Legal Service
OLAF (European Anti-Fraud Office)
Total
External affairs
DG External Relations
DG Trade
DG Enlargement
Total
Provision
DG Agriculture
DG Development
Total
Table 5.1 Commission Directorate-Generals as SNE Receivers
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the Dutch government to take active measures aimed at increasing the

number of Dutch officials, e.g., by introducing training courses for the concours and appointing an official to the Dutch EU Permanent Representation
responsible for co-ordinating Dutch appointments to EU institutions.37
Secondments, meanwhile, have been a safe way to secure Dutch posts.
Furthermore, the secondment system allows the country to send the right
people to Brussels and to create a good image so that the Commission actually requests Dutch SNEs.38 The Dutch SNE policy seems to have reached
this target since the Netherlands is currently the home of 62 SNEs to the European Commission, which comprises 5.8% of the SNE population. This,
however, is not exclusively due to government strategy. There are two other
factors that help to explain the relative over-representation of Dutch officials among SNEs. One is the proximity of the Netherlands to Belgium,
which makes it possible to keep one foot in the home country during the
secondment. The personal lives of potential Dutch SNEs suffer less than
those of their colleagues from further afield.39 Secondly and perhaps more
importantly, is the fact that the Netherlands has a high level of expertise in
the fields sought by the Commission, such as transport, research, environment, agriculture and financial markets.40 Table 5.1 indicates the distribution of respondent SNEs across policy areas and Commission DGs.
The table shows that half of the respondents were deployed within either
the market-oriented or the social regulation DGs, and that the top four receiving DGs were DG Competition, DG Internal Market and Service, DG
Environment and DG Transport and Energy.
Looking at the ministries and agencies that provide SNEs, the percentages by policy area are somewhat different than the percentages per policy
area for the receiving DGs. These differences are accounted for by the differences in organisational arrangements between the EU and Dutch central administration level.
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POLICY
AREA
MINISTRY
FREQUENCY
PERCENT
Market-oriented
FIN (Ministry of Finance)

EZ (Ministry of Economic Affairs)
NMA (Competition Authority)
DNB (National Reserve Bank)
AFM (Financial Markets Authority)
OPTA (Telecom Authority)
Total
LNV (Ministry of Agriculture)
Productschap Akkerbouw
(Arable Farming Commodity Board)
Total
SoZaWe (Ministry of Social Affairs)
MinJus (Ministry of Justice)
VROM (Ministry of Housing,
Spatial Planning and Environment)
VWS (Ministry of Health)
BVE Raad (Educational Board)
OCW (Ministry of Education)
Total
13
9
3
3
1
1
29
14
2
Provision
Social Regulation
16
5
4
3
3
1
1
1
16
33%
18%
18%
Supply side
VandW (Ministry of Transport)

Senter (Office for Sustainability
and Innovation)
Syntens (Entrepreneurial Innovation
Office)
Agentschap Douane (Customs Office)
TNO (Institute for Applied Sciences)
FOM (Foundation for Fundamental
Research on Matter)
European Science Foundation
Total
9
1
1
1
1
1
1
15
17%
10%
External affairs
BuZa (Ministry of Foreign Affairs)
Administration
CBS (Statistical Bureau)

CPB (Bureau for Economic Policy
Analysis)
Total
3
1
4
4%
N= 89
100%
Table 5.2 Dutch ministries and agencies as SNE Providers
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Not surprisingly, the top five suppliers of SNEs are the Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Safety, the Ministry of Finance (including the Dutch
Tax and Customs Administration), the Ministry of Economic Affairs, the
Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
There is a clear parallel between the organisations that are key providers
of SNEs and the organisations with the highest density of Europeanised
civil servants (chapter 2). Four out of the top five suppliers of SNEs feature
in the cluster of Eurocratic bulwarks, the Ministry of Finance and the Tax
Administration being the only exceptions as Eurocratic runners-up. This
can be seen as strengthening the validity of the league table of EU-ness of
Dutch public organisations presented in chapter 2.
5.4 Profiling the Dutch expert contingent

Who are the Dutch SNEs? Based on our survey and interview data, we construct a profile of Dutch SNEs with respect to their education level, age and
rank prior to secondment, and type of home organisation.
Based on the nature of the activities of SNE positions and on the interview responses, we infer that all SNEs are highly educated (HBO-level and
up) and that the overwhelming majority holds a university degree (Bachelors/Masters/PhD). Of the total group of respondents, 38% started their
secondment between the ages of 25 and 34, 33% between the ages of 35 and
44, 21% between 45 and 54, and 8% over 55. The average age at the start of
secondment was 40. This indicates that the Dutch government seconds
predominantly young to middle-age officials who are presumably at the beginning or in the middle of their careers. With respect to the rank of an SNE
upon secondment, some interesting patterns can be observed, as shown in
table 5.3.
About 63% of the SNEs were in ranks 10 to 12 prior to the start of their secondment, 31% were in ranks 13 and 14, and 6% were in ranks 15 and 16. The
average prior rank among the total group of SNEs was 12.47. These figures
seem to underline the assertion that EU-level activity among national civil
servants is more the domain of middle-level civil servants than of top-ranking civil servants, (Noordegraaf 2000; t Hart et al. 2002). The trend that the
frequency of SNEs decreases as rank increases is largely explained by the
fact that SNE positions are mostly policy-making posts, and policy preparation becomes increasingly less common as a main activity for civil servants
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FORMER
SNEs
CURRENT
SNEs
TOTAL
Higher civil servants

(Ranks: 10-12)
28
(66.7 %)
24
(58.5%)
52
(62.7%)
Senior civil servants

(Ranks: 13-14)
14
(33.3%)
12
(29.3%)
26
(31.3%)
Top civil servants

(Ranks: 15-16)
0
(0%)
5
(12.2%)
5
(6.0%)
42 (100%)
41
(100%)
N=83
(100%)
TOTAL
Table 5.3 Ranks of Dutch SNEs at the time of secondment
in ranks 14 and above.43 In section 5.6, we will return to the issue of rank,
within the framework of the discussion on career development through the
secondment system.
In the previous section, we already indicated the distribution of SNEs in
terms of their home organisations (table 5.1). Introducing the dichotomy of
executive agency vs. policy department (see also chapter 2), we observe that
76% of all respondents originated from policy departments, and 24% from
executive agencies. Apart from the fact that part of this difference is explained by the fact that most SNE positions are policy positions and many
fewer are executive positions, assuming that the share of SNEs delivered by
each type of organisation is a valid indicator of EU involvement, our findings are analogous with the conclusion found in chapter 2.3.2, namely that
policy departments are more involved in EU affairs than executive agencies.
With respect to the duration of the secondment, we observe that 17% of
the SNEs were seconded for less than a year, 34% for a period between one
and two years, 30% between two and three years, and 19% between three
and four years.44 So, the large majority of SNEs remains at the Commission
for about two years. A two-year stay is bound to provide enough time to supply substantive contributions to the work in the Commission and to constitute a substantial improvement for the individual SNE in terms of skills and
knowledge on the EU. If we consider the fact that 49% of Dutch SNEs stay
in the Commission between two to four years, this period of time is presumably also long enough to build a network at the EU, if not at the transna-
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tional level. Does the secondment period translate into returns for the SNEs
and the Dutch government in terms of networks and knowledge and can the
Dutch SNEs exchange their value-added for better career opportunities
which involve them using this EU know-who and know-how?
5.5 Knowing how and knowing who: Networking

We borrow our definitions of transnational policy networks from the multilevel governance literature where the role of informal bargaining between a
very wide variety of actors (individuals and institutions, public and private,
local, regional, national, European, international) is suggested to be at least
as decisive as formal power relations. Policy networks are defined here as
more or less stable sets of public and private organisational actors, linked to
each other by communication and by the exchange of resources, such as
information and expertise (Jnsson et al. 1998: 326). They consist of the
contacts, ties and connections between actors that develop as a complement
to formal institutional relations. The emergence of these networks is conditional upon the development of personal relations between relevant actors,
which in turn depends on their frequency of interaction. As such, policy
networks bring together individuals originating from different fields of
knowledge and social environments.
The significance of policy networks within EU governance is twofold:
know-how and know-who, i.e., an actor needs to have thorough substantive
knowledge, as well as knowledge of the organisations, procedures, and individuals who shape the policy environment (Jnsson and Strmvik 2005:
18). Furthermore, these networks are transnational and involve both governmental and non-governmental policy actors. Experts may be linked with
one another by means of vertical (i.e., across levels of governance), horizontal (i.e., across policy sectors and/or across government, corporate and research organisations) and potentially also diagonal (i.e., cutting through
both vertical and horizontal orderings) relations (Slaughter 2004, see also
chapter 1). These multilateral network links allow bureaucrats at various
levels of governance to prepare and implement policies assisted by organised interests supplying technically relevant expertise. This is the essence of
network governance (Kohler-Koch and Eising 1999).
To investigate to what extent SNEs form a bridge between their own
member state and the European Commission, we asked both groups of
SNEs questions involving the frequency of their reliance on their network
in the Netherlands and the Commission. A majority of current Dutch SNEs
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(53.3%) reported drawing upon the network they built in the Netherlands
prior to their secondment once a week. Another 47.7% said they were approached monthly by their former colleagues at the Dutch organisation
they worked for. Only 18.2% of the former SNEs were approached weekly
and 34.1% monthly by their former colleagues during their secondment period. Clearly, the current Dutch SNEs have more frequent contacts with
their network in the Netherlands. Their contacts also involve sending written information to their home organisation 53.3% have such contacts
monthly.
What does this network entail, however? To what extent do SNEs build up
and become part of transnational networks extending to different administrative levels in different member states, to non-state players, and other EU
and international organisations? Or are they just individual bridges between the Commission and the member state they come from? And, since
policy networks are assumed to be relatively stable and persistent; what happens to these networks after the secondment period? To what extent do the
bridges remain intact?
Whos in the loop?

We will first look at the frequency of SNE contacts across different levels and
actors. Since the scale employed does not have equal intervals, we use the
median to compare the results.
Survey Questions:
Current SNEs: How frequently do you have work-related contacts
and/or meetings with the following during your secondment?
Former SNEs: How frequently did you have work-related contacts
and/or meetings with the following during your secondment? / How
frequently do you have work-related contacts and/or meetings with
the following in your current function?
Answer categories: Once per day=5, Once per week=4, Once per month=3,
Once per year=2, Never=1
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Median:
Current
SNEs
Colleagues within other DGs
SNEs from:
- The Netherlands
- Other member states
Other EU institutions
Other international organisations
The Dutch EU Permanent Representation
EU Permanent Representations of other
member states
Median:
Former
SNEs during
secondment
Median:
Former
SNEs in
current
function
3
4
3
3
3
3
4
3
3
3
2
2
1
4
2
3
2
4
3
3
1
3
1
2
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
3
2.5
3
2
3
1
1
1
2
2
1
1
2
2
2
2
2
1
Dutch national administration:

- Own policy sector
- Other policy sectors
National administrations of other

member states:
- Own policy sector
- Other policy sectors
Representatives of regional governments

from:
- The Netherlands
Representatives of local governments from:

- The Netherlands
Representatives of the private sector from:

- The Netherlands
Representatives of NGOs from:

- The Netherlands
Universities or research institutes from:

- The Netherlands
Table 5.4 Frequency of Dutch SNE contacts
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If we concentrate on the medians higher than 2, since this offers the most
regular contacts, we see that only a few actors actually fall into this category.
The most frequent contacts are within the Commission and with the Dutch
national administration within the officials own policy sector. Other EU institutions, international organisations, the Dutch EU Permanent Representation, and sectoral contacts with other member states are the most
forthcoming contact points in the supranational and national arena. The
non-governmental aspect among the SNE networks is occupied by Dutch,
and to a lesser extent, by European business.
The figures for the contacts of past SNEs during their secondment follow
a similar pattern with few exceptions.47 When we turn to the network patterns of former SNEs in their current function, however, we see that their
contacts are clustered predominantly within the Dutch national administration. Meanwhile, the Commission and Dutch business figures are the
other most forthcoming network partners. The results clearly show that the
only lasting transnational or supranational networks for SNEs are within
the Commission.
A number of conclusions can be drawn from these observations. The
SNE secondment system does stimulate the formation of transnational networks, but applying these data to the three types of network relations set out
in this article, we see that the network connections fall largely under the vertical dimension of network relations, to a lesser degree under the horizontal
dimension, and only to a very limited extent under the diagonal dimension
of network relations. Therefore, the SNEs do indeed form bridges between
the Commission and the member state and provide a channel for the flow of
information, ideas and contacts.
Networking as strategic behaviour

How do the SNEs fulfil this bridging function in practice? Of the three avenues for strategic behaviour available to member-state governments, signalling, frontloading and the coalition-building introduced in chapter 3,
SNEs play a significant role in the first two. SNEs, especially in the pre-proposal stage, can use their position within the Commission and the wider
networks to influence the content of proposals.48 As one SNE emphasised,
Apart from the SNEs, The Hague has no access whatsoever to what happens in the early stages of the Commissions legislative process.49
SNEs facilitate signalling in the sense that they offer easy access points
for national civil servants and officials at the Permanent Representation so
that they can pursue certain national interests or concerns within the Com-
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mission apparatus and vice versa. When Dutch government officials begin
seeking an access point within the Commission, they first seek out a fellownational to talk to.50 This usually means an SNE, who plays the role of a
switchboard within the Commission. Roughly half of former SNEs and the
majority of the current SNEs (63% of the interview respondents) indicate
they were relatively frequently used as an EU helpdesk for the members of
their home organisations. Words they use to describe their role include:
feeler, resonance box, ambassador, antenna, brainstorming partner
but also missionary and infiltrator.
The practice of signalling rests on trust-based reciprocity, and the necessary level of trust can stem from nationality or previous trust-generating interactions. In this sense, the SNE networks make the flow of information
between the Commission and the member state possible:
I have personal contacts with my former colleagues. My Ministry approaches me first. I discuss the issues with colleagues who call. The
other way around, when there is a new strategy I will first sound out
ideas with colleagues in the Netherlands in order to use existent
knowledge in the Netherlands within the ministries.51
Signalling can thus work in two directions:
Your SNE position makes it possible to notify colleagues at home, so
that they can anticipate the Commissions course of action. For instance, they can prepare sabotage strategies, proposals for amendment or forge alliances. In some cases, the timing of a member state
entering the policy game is decided by the SNE.52
In terms of the Commission, both the network and the experience of the
SNE at the national level are valuable for the Commission because:
the permanent officials do not need to have any experience or network at the national administration level. This is the value-added of an
SNE. At the end of the day, the Commission focuses on member states,
so it is important to have a network within these member states. Furthermore, the officials have no experience with practice. As an SNE,
you learn a lot about what happens on the ground in practice. That is
a big asset. You just know how it works and how things are implemented.53
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It is in the Commissions interest to know what the member state is considering.54 In turn, the information is then channelled to the Commission
which can thus be used as input on a proposal.
The importance of SNEs with respect to frontloading, is even more crucial, given that the appointment of SNEs within a specific DG is the central
instrument for this type of strategic behaviour. That the Dutch Ministry of
Agriculture, among others, sends its officials to strategic positions in the
Commission, as argued in chapter 3, finds support in the account of an SNE
seconded from this ministry:
Your influence depends on your position. I work in the field of phytosanitary and veterinary trade barriers. Of course, the Netherlands
has a strategic interest in this area. It is interesting to see how the Commission deals with this issue. As an exporting country, it is very important to have someone at such a strategic position within the Commission, both for the Netherlands and for my own Ministry.55
In short: strategic appointments in view of certain important dossiers are a
pivotal method of frontloading.
The other two mechanisms through which frontloading is secured as a
strategic route are (a) through instructions from superior; and (b) as a result
of the national-cultural perspective taken by the SNE in question on the
policy issue. Dutch SNEs claim that they do not receive any direct instructions from the Dutch government, which is quite different from SNEs of
other member states:
There are countries with an SNE policy. The UK sends instructions
and influences opinion-building with position papers. The French
SNEs are also given follow-ups. The Netherlands does this less. You
sometimes end up reading the national position bij chance in a newsletter.56
While some SNEs believe they should exert national influence, others believe the influence should be exercised by the Dutch Permanent Representation instead.57 In that sense, some SNEs seem to totally endorse their
Commission identity: Expertise is the most important. We are not the
member state representatives here. They are in the Council.58
Still, the secondment system offers the member state the opportunity to
support EU files with its own people.59 This happens via the direct involve-
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ment of SNEs in the Commission. They can make the Dutch voice heard in
Brussels.60 This is actually what our Dutch SNE respondents consider the
frontloading method, which is much more common and much more appropriate in terms of exercising influence. The Ministry does not need to
dictate to SNEs since they already have an indirect influence over them by
way of the process of thinking as a Dutchman.61 This is also a transparent
national method, since the proposal drafted by a Dutch SNE still needs to
pass through all the official EU procedures. Thus, this viewpoint gets locked
into the proposal and might be altered at various junctures, but the general
spirit rarely changes substantially. In other words, the first blow is half the
battle, and SNEs play a pivotal role in enabling member-states to strike that
first blow.
With respect to the contribution to the policy process, the nationality of
an SNE influences his or her way of thinking: 62 Although you never have
a substantial mandate, what you do bring to the table in the policy-making
process is a Dutch point of view on the policy issue in question.63 As another SNE observed:
The SNE brings his own experience, way of thinking, and problemsolving strategy to the Commission, all of which have been developed
within a specific framework of ones home country. Once you are faced
with real policy issues at the Commission, the first reflex is to fall back
into ones old routines. As time goes by, he may place issues within a
wider, more European framework, but still the SNEs prior experience
or even the tradition he comes from continues to play a large role.64
Furthermore, many SNEs reported that while they were seconded they continued to follow the Dutch media (newspapers, television, etc.) and that for
a considerable part, their social lives remained more centred in the Netherlands than in Brussels. As a result of the stronger links that SNEs have with
their home countries compared to permanent Commission officials, SNEs
are also better able to reflect the stakes of a member state and to anticipate
national policy positions.65 An interesting distinction that both current and
former SNEs made is the one between Dutch permanent Commission officials and SNEs. Permanent Dutch officials have reportedly far less direct
contact with officials at the national administration level than SNEs. At the
same time, SNEs perceive permanent officials as being more independent
in relation to their members home country. This seems to indicate that the
width and depth of an officials network in the member state does not de-
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pend so much on an officials nationality, but more on whether the official is

pre-socialised in a national context and whether the official is legally bound
to the national administration.
One SNE noted that the national perspective taken by the SNE serves the
benefit of the Commission, too:
It is very common to present the problems or positions of your member-state. I was also regularly approached by other Commission civil
servants who wanted to put out their feelers in the early stages to find
out whether or not a specific proposal would be greeted with enthusiasm by the Netherlands. So, the presence of SNEs allows for a
smoother and quicker policy process because SNEs are normally well
aware of various national positions.66
However, it should be noted that the mere presence of SNEs within the various DGs does not automatically lead to a successful outcome and that the
degree of success is contingent upon the degree of co-ordination of SNE activity from the national department and the effectiveness of the SNE in mobilising his or her network to influence the authors of a policy proposal. This
leads to the situation where member states have the opportunity to have an
impact on the policy-making process if they can second their civil servants
purposefully and strategically. The Dutch government seems to have adopted this strategic approach with the aim of gaining more access to the EU by
building and sharing experiences through the secondment system.67
However, roughly half of the former SNEs reported that there was not
enough interest on the part of their seconding organisation for the potential
gains that secondment could have for these organisations. Out of sight, out
of mind, was a very frequent description of the perceived attitude of the
sending organisation towards the SNE during the secondment. Many
pointed out that it was they who had to take the initiative of contacting their
home ministry, and that the ministry did not make enough use of their presence in the Commission. The situation may be changing, however: our data
signals a difference between the current and the former SNEs in terms of
the degree of contact between the home organisation and the SNE during
secondment (see table 5.4). It seems that the contacts between SNEs and
their home organisations have indeed increased over the past few years. A
second conceivable explanation for this variation is the potential propensity
by officials to think more positively about the relationship with their home
organisation during their secondment while they are seconded rather than
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after their return, given that many respondents were disappointed by the
treatment they received from their home organisations upon return, which
seems to be common as the following sections suggest.
Do SNE networks persist?

The empirical evidence above demonstrates the bridging function of seconded officials during their secondment. However, the lasting effects of the
secondment system can only be assessed by addressing the question of
whether the bridge remains intact after the secondment. Using the knowledge and networks they acquired during the secondment is the most crucial
payoff of the secondment system for the member state government: When
you know the internal procedures of the EU, you can anticipate instead of
reacting. Your Commission network allows to keep on anticipating. This
is perhaps more important than anything else. The ministries, in turn,
acquire more of an understanding of what can be done and what cannot.68
Several respondents observed that building up and maintaining a network with people at the Commission level is easier than maintaining a network with officials at the national level. The organisational culture at the
Commission level is apparently more open to establishing longer-term professional and social contacts than the organisational culture in their Dutch
home organisations.69 Since not all SNEs originate from within the Dutch
central government, but also from agencies and semi-governmental institutions, the secondment system can also help create networks between the
SNE and governmental actors at the national level, which may become beneficial once the secondment has ended.
Our findings convincingly show, however, that although the expertise
of Dutch ministries/authorities flows largely toward the Commission, the
Dutch administration does not always get the EU expertise back. In other
words, the bridge is often one-way: only 27 of 43 (62.8%) former SNEs from
our sample still work for the organisation they worked for prior to their secondment.70
This means that network ties in turn also seem to grow weaker once an
SNE returns 27.5% of the former SNEs stated that they continue to use the
network they established during their secondment in their current function
at least once a month while another 25% use it only once a year, and 17.5% do
not use their Commission network at all.
It is also striking that current SNEs expressed relatively high hopes regarding the degree to which they believe they will be able to professionally
utilise their networks, while the majority of former SNEs demonstrated
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their disappointment with respect to how much they actually use their networks in their present jobs since their secondment. Given that many former
SNEs also reported that they had considerable expectations in this respect
before and during their secondment, we interpret these differences as an
indication of overly optimistic prospects on the part of current SNEs rather
than an increase in the levels of opportunities to utilise acquired networks
upon their return to their home administrations.
During the interviews with former SNEs, many respondents indicated
that their networks within and, when applicable, outside the Commission
had grown outdated and were thus of little or no use. This is remarkable,
considering that the secondments of our respondents had ended on average
only two years earlier. In most cases, the reason for their networks becoming outdated was the fact that their first job after the secondment did not require their networks. A considerable number of these respondents noted
that while they made little to no use of their established networks professionally, they did maintain personal contacts with their secondment colleagues.
Some of these respondents, with current jobs that do not enable them to
make formal professional use of their networks, did indicate that the personal contacts they maintained did yield some information, which may or
may not have a bearing on their current employment, although some of it
was sometimes of interest to their organisations. They were convinced that
their present colleagues for whom this information might be relevant did
not get the same information as timely: Through my network at the Commission I get information about issues that no one else within my organisation has access to; 71 and It is always nice to have more information on an
issue or receive it earlier than your boss, for instance. Because I know a
number of people at the Commission, I get this informational advantage
vis--vis my boss.72 These respondents reported networks form a more personal and indirect way back into their organisations.
Others who felt their network had, to some extent, dissolved indicated
that a large part of their network had already left Brussels as well, and that
they did not have new contact information for most of these people. Nevertheless, respondents who indicated that their networks were outdated did
acknowledge that their secondments and their familiarity with the structures of the Commission gave them an advantage in building up new networks in their current jobs.
On the contrary, former SNEs with jobs that still have a good connection
at the Commission reported that the benefits of their acquired networks
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were substantial. This indicates a positive correlation between, on the one

hand, the degree of compatibility between the jobs SNEs had during secondment and the jobs they now held, and, on the other hand, the degree to
which officials have been able to maintain their networks and utilise them
professionally.
5.6 Life after secondment: SNEs and their careers

If the Dutch government wants the benefits of its investments in the SNEs
not only during but after their secondment, there needs to be a proactive career planning programme for the SNEs upon their return. The reality, however, has been quite different. First, since only 62.8% of SNEs actually return, it is clear that the current return guarantee is insufficient to ensure
any return on investment.
SNE interviewees have pointed out the gap between expectations built
up in Brussels and the reality upon their return to The Hague. The high expectations stem from the fact that SNEs feel they grow enormously during
their secondments and expect to be rewarded for this upon their return.
The reality is often quite different, so much so that current SNEs tend to be
concerned about their futures based on their knowledge of their predecessors fates:
The return policy is an important issue. SNEs gain substantial and
practical knowledge at the EU institutions. There is currently is no
management system in place to take care of what happens after secondment. Secondment is not a promotion. Until now, SNEs have not
been rewarded upon return. Some have been promoted away. Now
that the number of SNEs has doubled, it is time to overhaul the policies
concerning returning SNEs. After all, secondment should be good for
your career.73
However, when looking at their national careers upon their return, we see
that secondment entails stagnation, since SNEs maintain the same rank
during the entire secondment period regardless of their personal growth.
They return to the same job and rank, which constitutes a relative loss of opportunity for many who would have otherwise had a chance for promotion.74 At the same time, their peers at the ministry in The Hague continue
to rise among the ranks, as they are still visible to their superiors at the ministry whereas the SNE in Brussels also becomes also out of sight and out of
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mind in terms of their career planning. In the words of an SNE: In the

Netherlands, they are not sitting and waiting for you. They say: Are you still
alive? We have to find something for you. So it is not good for your career in
the Netherlands.75
The fears of the current SNEs find life in the experience of former SNEs.
One observation seems to represent the sentiments of a large number of
former SNEs:
Beforehand I expected that the secondment would offer me additional
career opportunities, but as it turned out, this was by no means the
case. For those who managed to get a permanent position with the
Commission afterwards, it has obviously paid off. But all the people I
know that have been seconded are disappointed in terms of the supposed advantage that they were to get out of their secondment. No
wonder that most of them leave within a year after they have returned
to work elsewhere where their Brussels experience does get valued.76
Former SNEs were asked whether they believed that their secondment had
offered them any career advancement, 51% answered negatively.77
Comparing the present ranks of former SNEs with the ranks they had
just before being seconded, it turns out that among those who were seconded in the period 2000-2005, 57% were still at the same rank, 29% had
moved up one rank, while 11% had moved up two ranks (the remaining
3% represents one individual who had actually been demoted one rank). In
other words, of the former SNEs included in our study, 60% had not been
significantly promoted, during or since the completion of their secondment. The average upward mobility among this group during an average
period of 3.75 years was by 0.49 in rank. Although we have not been able to
compare this figure with national civil servants of the same age, educational level and organisation during the same period, this rate of upward mobility is by no means spectacular.
As long as this image is sustained and there is no concrete career planning, the SNEs will continue to take steps in their career that ultimately decrease their chance of returning to their original ministry employers. Their
old positions do not offer enough challenges, which urges many to begin
searching for alternative employment, whether it is in Brussels or in the private sector in the Netherlands.
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CURRENT SECTOR
RETURN to PREVIOUS
ORGANISATION
Yes
No
Frequency
(Percent)
Public
25
29 (67.4%)
Semi-public
5 (11.6%)
Private
4 (9.3%)
Public international (Commission, IO)
3 (7.0%)
None (Retired)
2 (4.7%)
TOTAL
27 (62.8%)
16 (27.2%)
N= 43
Table 5.5 SNE return rate after secondment
As the figures for the former SNEs show, SNEs who do not return to their
home organisation make career moves in various directions.
One remarkable exception here is the Ministry of Agriculture SNEs. This
Eurocratic bulwark ministry in particular scores very high in terms of luring its SNEs back: of the eight Agriculture SNEs, seven of them are still
working for the ministry. This is because, interviewees pointed out, the
Ministry of Agriculture has a more consistent policy regarding their SNEs.
While some did end up in their old positions, others obtained promotions to
positions that matched their profiles.78 Thus the Ministrys reputation as a
true Eurocratic bulwark (see chapter 2) also applies to its career management of its SNEs.
On the whole, however, a secondment with the Commission can hardly
be seen as a route to career advancement for those involved. Being seconded
has actually had a negative career effect, at least for some of the SNEs who
were seconded in the early years of the 21st century. This is not a typical
Dutch phenomenon. A survey among former SNEs from various member
states conducted in 2002 shows that problems regarding career advancement were a general phenomenon associated with the entire secondment
system.79
5.7 An under-utilised asset: Conclusions

Our empirical data on Dutch former and current SNEs show that SNEs do
build bridges between the EU and the member state via their roles in forming and sometimes maintaining policy networks in EU governance. These
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contacts between the Commission and national ministries allow the member state to signal and frontload its positions and viewpoints into the policy
proposals of the Commission through its SNEs. This, however, should not
be interpreted as a direct national influence. Firstly, the Commission welcomes the experience, networks and input of the SNEs because the success
of policy proposals depends on the member states themselves. SNEs also
stress how loyal they are to the Commission during their secondment. Secondly, the influence is exercised fairly indirectly through the SNEs own
thought processes which they characterise as having been shaped by their
national background and upbringing. Thirdly, there is an entire chain of
command before the SNEs draft proposal reaches the upper levels of the
Commission where sections of the proposal may be modified. Finally, other
than the distinction between national or EU interests, the role of expertise
itself may be a third significant variable. Experts working within transnational networks develop distinct professional norms and values. Although
this study does not take this factor into account, future contributions to this
field could benefit from the inclusion of the role of expertise as a source of
substantive preferences. On the whole, however, secondment seems still to
be a legitimate and valued exchange system of officials for both the Commission and the member states.
However, our study has also demonstrated that not all of the hopes people have for the secondment system are fulfilled and the long-term benefits
of these networks are often fairly limited, which can be perceived as an opportunity loss for the seconding member states. Many former SNEs do not
land in jobs that allow them to draw upon their Commission networks;
many do not return to their original home organisations.
Since networks are more dependent upon individuals than positions
within an organisation, the enhanced trust and frank exchange may persist
after someone changes position. The conditions under which this persistence is more or less likely to occur remains uncultivated research territory.
These networks can facilitate decision-making by dispatching more and
more national experts onto the supranational level and subsequently reabsorbing these same experts back into ones national administration (see
Beyers and Kerremans 2004).
In this chapter, we have identified a number of mechanisms through
which SNEs can potentially play a linking role between the Commission
and the member state. The secondment system does indeed facilitate information flows and, in specific cases, influences an intricate web of relations
across the formal institutional structures of the EU and its member states.
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The results of the Dutch case, however, show that the SNEs are not optimally utilised. Even though the recent efforts of the Dutch government have led
to increased levels of contact between the SNEs and their home base, there
is still much room for improvement. When considering how the benefits of
the secondment system can be made to endure after the secondment period, the career paths of the officials after their secondment are a crucial factor. At present, expertise and networks fade quickly as experts, quite literally, move on. Better career planning for the SNEs would prevent this from
happening and maximise the benefits for the member state.
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CHAPTER 6
UNDERSTANDING EUROCRATIC WORK:

CONCLUSIONS AND REFLECTIONS
6.1 Dutch Eurocracy revisited
The research reported in this study was prompted by the widely perceived
shift from classic to new diplomacy in the very design and day-to-day
practices of international regimes such as the European Union. We set out
to examine what implications the rise of policy-oriented, domain-specific
bilateral, as well as multilateral, diplomacy (noted in chapter 1) has had on
how nation-states organise their relations with their regional neighbours
and the web of international organisations they belong to or are engaged in.
By focusing on the case of the Netherlands and its modus operandi in the European Union, we wanted to document how its executive branch practices
the art of doing the governments business at the international level. Over
half a century of deepening and widening European integration has clearly
led to an increased involvement of hitherto domestic ministries and officials, but how large has this shift been, and what forms has it actually taken?
In particular, we sought answers to the following three research questions:
1. To what extent are Dutch civil servants involved in EU-related activities?
2. How do individual Dutch civil servants experience and practise the
craft of policy-making for and in European arenas?
3. How and to what extent are these civil servants facilitated and constrained by existing ways of organising European affairs in their respective organisations?
Each of these questions was specified in a number of more specific issues
(see chapter 1 and below). In this final chapter, we review the findings
regarding each of these issues, which we gathered through a range of complementary research methods. We summarise the main findings of the
preceding empirical chapters with regard to each of the main research ques-
understanding eurocratic work: conclusions and reflections
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tions. We will also try to integrate the findings from the two surveys and the
two qualitative case studies to draw a number of overarching conclusions.
And we will confront our empirical findings with the outcomes of the expert
meetings that were held in the final stages of the fieldwork phase of the project. These expert meetings were meant to provide a sounding board for our
observations, allowing us to better assess the extent to which they were
shared by people working on EU-related matters within a wide range of organisations in central government.
6.2 Eurocrats: How many, where?

Our comprehensive survey tracing the European involvement of Dutch
civil servants (see chapter 2) yields a clear yet somewhat paradoxical conclusion: although nobody doubts the large and increased significance of the
European Union for how the Netherlands is governed, the number of
Dutch central government bureaucrats actively engaged in EU matters is
still modest. Although overall a firm 30% of respondents indicated that
their work is affected by the EU, by far most of them actually spend little
time on EU-related activities. Plus a change, plus cest la mme chose. EU-related work to date, although no longer the near-exclusive domain of Foreign
Affairs and Agriculture officials, has remained somewhat of a specialised
activity in Dutch central government. Doing the Dutch governments business in Brussels, with Brussels, or as a result of decisions made in Brussels,
is a matter of pockets of specialists scattered around departments and agencies, not one of which involves a broad front of public servants.
The survey also revealed important differences in the levels of Europeanisation among various central government organisations. Generally
speaking, organisations in which more civil servants were involved in EUrelated activities, also had respondents who spent more time on those activities and the activities tended to be dispersed more widely across the entire
organisation, while the opposite held true for organisations with fewer Europeanised civil servants.
Hence, although the new diplomacy covers a vast and increasing range
of issues and policies that used to be purely domestic or even subnational
government concerns, the number of fully engaged new diplomats is
modest by comparison. This finding may be somewhat surprising. Unfortunately, at present it is impossible to put it into a broader historical or crossnational comparative perspective. To our knowledge, no similar study has
been conducted before in the Netherlands or anywhere else for that matter.
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6.3 Eurocratic work: Individual professionalism

Our second major research question, regarding the Eurocratic practices of
individual public servants, was broken down into six specific issues: their
role orientations, their activity and contact patterns, the arenas and channels they use to do their business, how they see and use the rules of the European policy game, their standards of effectiveness (what constitutes a
good days work? for a Eurocrat), and the knowledge and expertise they
think Eurocrats need to possess in order to achieve their goals. Below we
discuss our main findings concerning each of these issues.
Role orientations
The original question here was: what do national civil servants see as their
chief tasks and goals when they participate in European policy processes?
This study clearly shows that there are various ways of perceiving Eurocratic work, which conform to the three categories of Eurocrats discerned in
chapter 4, and which can be grouped along a continuum ranging from
business as usual to the radical re-invention of policy work. Those closest
to the business as usual end are those officials who resemble the back
office co-ordinator ideal type. Their work is essentially in The Hague, and
consists of working the levers of intradepartmental and interdepartmental
consultation in order to facilitate coherent Dutch positions to fit into EU
timetables (cf. Ekengren 2004). A more hybridised role conception can be
found among a large majority of the bureaucrat-diplomats, who see themselves as having a dual role:
In EU arenas, their role is to articulate and represent the Dutch interest vis--vis other member-states and the European institutions;
In the Netherlands, they see their role as selling the EU to their colleagues and creating a better understanding of the possibilities and
constraints inherent in European co-operation.
These people are intermediaries operating on the cutting edge of two
worlds: the world of European co-operation and the world of national policymaking and its bureaucratic politics. These dual roles may conflict when
there are clear tensions between Dutch preferences and the EUs policy directions. At the same time, various interviewees confided that they often use
that tension creatively, telling constituents in one arena that they are under
severe pressure from the other, and vice versa. The job is perhaps more difficult for bureaucrat diplomats operating in organisations where the overall
degree of Europeanisation is low, and where doing business in Europe is
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much less interesting or prestigious than doing business in The Hague.

They face constant scepticism from colleagues as well as their direct superiors when they try to raise their awareness of the significance of the EU to the
work of their section let alone when theyre trying to argue the case for investing more time, expertise and money in the development of a serious EU
presence.
On the other end of the continuum, most street-level entrepreneurs within
departments and executive agencies see their roles at the European/international level as an opportunity for policy innovation. The generic drive to
get things done with regard to concrete needs, problems and opportunities
arising at the shop floor level of policy implementation and service delivery
leads these actors to play down their roles as representatives of the Dutch
position in favour of their practical professionalism when engaging their
peers in the Commission or those from other countries. They operate in
settings where the rules of the game are less dense and fixed, and cherish
the opportunities of unorthodox, innovative, joint problem-solving that this
entails.
These observations tie in with the literature, which shows that participants in EU decision-making situations tend to oscillate between representing national positions on the one hand, and embracing the core beliefs and
Back office
co-ordinators
Bureaucratdiplomats
Street-level
entrepreneurs
Key strengths
Facilitate emergence
of timely and coherent
departmental and
national positions
Skilful negotiators
for national positions
while minimising
Dutch opportunity
costs of European
integration
Practical professional
problem solvers
exploiting opportunities for transnational
co-operation
Key weaknesses
Immersed in domestic bureaucratic

politics, out of touch
with EU-level and on
the ground realities
Status-quo players
immersed in the
procedural politics
of European policy
processes
Out-of-control hobbyists with no grasp of

the main game of
European integration
and the need for an
integrated national
approach to playing it
Table 6.1 Strengths and weaknesses of Eurocratic ideal types
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ambitions of their professional policy domain, on the other (for example,

Thedvall 2006). Moreover, our study confirms the conclusion from earlier
research that purely supranational (i.e., EU-related) loyalties tend to be
scarce among national civil servants because their allegiance is primarily
with their own government and/or policy area (cf. Suvarierol 2007). Our
study adds to this current literature by identifying the predominant role
conceptions that certain types of civil servants have, who, we argue, tend to
each operate within specific types of international policy networks.
The contrast drawn in chapter 4 between the three types of civil servants,
but particularly between bureaucrat-diplomats and street-level entrepreneurs, is an ideal-typical one. We do not argue, for example, that no Eurocrats with street-level entrepreneurial role orientations are found in First
Pillar settings, and vice versa. In reality, the picture is more mixed. However, it is useful to keep the pure types in mind, and reflect on their potential
strengths and weaknesses.
For example, as table 6.1 shows, bureaucrat-diplomats risk ending up as
essentially conservative, national or even departmental status-quo players
focused more on the formal and diplomatic exigencies of European policymaking than on the potential gains of deeper integration and the pragmatic
possibilities of professional problem solving. Street-level entrepreneurs,
by contrast, have to be careful not to be seen as professional hobbyists who
use their roles as Dutch representatives in expert committees to indulge in
hobby-like activities with like-minded foreign experts, whilst eluding hierarchical controls that are designed to induce them to represent Dutch rather
than collegial outlooks and interests with regard to the matters at hand.
The activity and contact patterns of Eurocrats

The three general clusters of Europeanised civil servants were reflected in
the results of the comparative case study into the veterinary and police cooperation domains. In the area of veterinary policy, interviewees found it
difficult to distinguish between time allotted to EU-related and non-EUrelated activities, since their policy area has been thoroughly Europeanised.
As a result, EU-related and domestic policies and activities have become
intertwined and concrete activities relate to both levels simultaneously. This
is not only true for the relation between the EU-level and the domestic level:
veterinary policy is also embedded in global networks, blurring the distinction between the EU and the global level. In police co-operation, the distinction between domestic and EU-level work is much clearer. Large parts of
police work and criminal policy are firmly domestic in scope. As a result, of-
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ficials in the field of police co-operation tend to differentiate more sharply

between activities that relate to each of these levels. Within the field of police
co-operation, the extent of involvement in EU-related activities depends on
ones position within the organisation. EU-related activities appear to be allocated to a small number of specialised officials who have made it their
main job. For them, EU-related activities take up a considerable part of their
work, whereas for others it is only a minor or negligible part of their daily
work.
In terms of contact patterns what working on EU-related matters actually entails in terms of the ways public servants spend their time another
distinction emerges. Some officials operate on the front line of contacts
with officials from other governments and EU institutions. This group encompasses both the bureaucrat-diplomats and the street-level entrepreneurs of chapter 4. Departmental co-ordination bureaucrats, in contrast,
occupy a back office position. They co-ordinate EU-related work inside
their own departments and in relation to other departments, but rarely engage in direct contacts with foreign counterparts themselves. They mainly
interact with their departmental colleagues (including the departmental liaison at the Permanent Representation in Brussels) as well as with their
counterparts from other ministries.
The two types of jobs are very different in terms of activities and required
skills, but both are relevant in terms of understanding the patterns of activities in the EU and in Dutch central government. Every member-state needs
Eurocratically astute street-level entrepreneurs and bureaucrat-diplomats; but also well-resourced and effectively joined-up EU co-ordination
bureaucrats in every department.
Arenas and channels for Eurocratic work

Where does European policy-making happen for Dutch civil servants?
Again, the answer is a qualified one. Where their European work takes them
depends on what kind of job civil servants have. As the survey showed, most
civil servants who deal with the EU do so in terms of policy implementation
and transposition or are confronted with EU policies in making domestic
policies. A smaller number of civil servants are involved in EU policy-making processes, be it directly in European forums or indirectly in the process
of preparing and co-ordinating the Dutch input into EU decision-making.
The activities of civil servants involved in EU policy-making were the focus of our case studies. Based on these cases, we can discern three main
loci of EU-related policy-making activities. For co-ordination bureaucrats,
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European policy-making happens in The Hague. They are the central figures in (inter)departmental networks that are involved in EU policy-making
and/or the implementation of EU law and policies. For bureaucrat-diplomats, European policy-making happens in Brussels. They go to committee,
working group and high-level meetings in Brussels and meet colleagues
there. In the case of police co-operation, which falls under the EUs Third
Pillar, contacts with foreign counterparts outside of these formal meetings
are comparatively rare. In veterinary policy, which falls under the EUs First
Pillar, contacts also take place outside of the formal meetings in order to
form decision-making coalitions in the committee.
Finally, for Dutch street-level entrepreneurs, European policy-making can
happen anywhere in Europe. These officials are actively engaged in forming networks with foreign counterparts in order to exchange information,
enhance mutual understanding, and undertake joint actions in response to
commonly experienced problems. These informal networks and their joint
activities may be formalised in EU decision-making forums, but often this
is not the case, or EU actors only come in as targets for lobby activities, sponsors or simply people to talk to.
Formal and informal rules of the Eurocratic game

How does policy-making unfold in these arenas? The literature on EU committees has pointed out that different policy-making arenas within the EU
operate under different rules and that these differences matter for how their
participants can operate within them. As demonstrated in chapter 4, Council Working Parties emphasise the nationality of participants much more,
leading to stronger national role perceptions by member-state representatives. Whereas in Commission expert groups, national backgrounds are
de-emphasised, leading to a stronger identification of the participants with
the EU or their professional roles. Furthermore, prior research has emphasised that institutional changes to the EU fabric such as enlargement and
the diffusion of co-decision procedures have seriously affected the incentive structures of individual member-states and their representatives.
Our study echoes these findings insofar as it pertains to these formal EU
arenas. During the expert meetings, several participants noted that the advent of co-decision in their issue areas has meant that they are now channelling more efforts into lobbying MEPs than they used to. The same goes
for the outreach to national parliamentarians: as national parliaments are
brought more and more into the loop of European policy-making, national
Eurocrats (will have to) adjust their support-building strategies.
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In sum, the officials interviewed and observed in this study emphasised

how the context within which they operate shapes their behaviour in different ways:
The main basis for engaging with foreign counterparts. Formal EU
arenas have acquired their own institutional momentum and encourage and constrain particular practices by national Eurocrats. At the
same time, officials operating in Third Pillar and/or implementation
settings emphasise the pivotal role played by informal networks, driven not by formal decision rules but by strongly motivated, proactive individuals from various countries and the coalitions of the willing they
are constantly seeking to build and maintain.
The implicit understanding of participants in terms of which roles Eurocrats should play when and where, and which roles they can expect
their domestic and foreign counterparts to play. These expectations
pertain, among others, to the (de)emphasis of national, departmental
and professional identities and loyalties, or to the allocation of attention to particular arenas, networks and relationships at the European
level.
The domestic co-ordination process prior to and following European
meetings: departments oscillate between centralised and decentralised models of co-ordinating their EU-related work, choices which
obviously influence the discretion and support experienced by individual Eurocrats.
Different loci of European decision may vary in terms of these elements, as
highlighted by the comparison of beliefs and practices of civil servants in
the veterinary and policing fields, respectively. The former were clearly focused on the Commission-led process of proposal development and formal
decision-making that characterises First Pillar contexts. In the latter, especially street-level entrepeneurs, operating in the less institutionalised, more
pluralistic Third Pillar context naturally gravitated more towards informal
networking as a predominant mode of doing business in Europe.
The expert meetings confirmed this picture. The closer officials are to
formal EU decision-making and the more closely they are integrated into
the departmental organisation in The Hague, the more formalised the rules
of the game will be and the more strongly these officials will see themselves
as representing the interests of the Netherlands as a member-state and/or
of their native department. Likewise, the more peripheral officials and
their operative domains are to formal EU decision-making and to the core
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international agenda of their departments, the less formalised the rules of

mutual co-operation, the greater the discretion accorded to the individual
issue experts, the greater the reliance on interpersonal ties between (often
long-standing) members of ongoing expert committees, and the more
strongly officials will see themselves as representatives of an international
profession dealing with common, borderless problems.
Doing EU business well: Quality and effectiveness measures

What do Dutch civil servants consider to be a proper job in operating on the
European stage? In chapter 3, we started from the presumption that individual civil servants simply strive to achieve European policies that are in accord with the national preferences they are supposed to represent. Achieving these national preferences is the overriding measure of effectiveness. In
chapter 4, we further disaggregated this general measure of effectiveness
by empirically discerning two main views of success among the three types
of civil servants working on EU-related activities. One considers success
in terms of getting things on the agenda and factoring Dutch interests into
EU decisions. This view is held by most back office co-ordinators and the
bureaucrat-diplomats representing the Netherlands in formal EU decisionmaking arenas. The second view considers success in terms of solving (operational) problems of co-operation with foreign counterparts. This view is
held by the bulk of the more operational bureaucrats who participate in
expert and comitology committees and/or operate in more freewheeling
emergent areas of EU activity.
These views reflect different ideas about the role, purpose and practical
possibilities of European co-operation. They also reflect different work contexts within which these civil servants operate. Officials who hold a bureaucratic-diplomatic view operate within a set of incentives and constraints
that closely resembles the preoccupations of civil servants working on domestic issues within central government departments, which is contributing to the shaping of policy decisions and helping the minister to shine, or
at least to avoid problems. It is particularly in policy areas that are fairly
politicised at the European level that these classical imperatives of departmental bureaucratic life become more important.
Those who hold a street-level entrepreneurial view tend to be faced with
a different set of incentives and constraints that focuses much more on daily service delivery, which translates into a different set of criteria for quality
and effectiveness. When the two worlds meet, there is often a certain degree
of friction, as these different logics of EU policy-making are not necessarily
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easily aligned. Hence, entrepreneurial executive agency officials frequently

expressed bemusement at the meddling and limited added value of the
departmental middle managers they were forced to deal with. Likewise,
departmental officials note that they were sometimes exasperated with the
go-at-it-alone instincts of operational experts, as well as with their inability
to grasp the big picture of European policy in a particular domain.
It should be noted that the expert group meetings provided somewhat of
a corrective to this line of analysis. They harboured three lessons. First, the
national position is not always clearly and unambiguously formulated, and
the dynamics of EU meetings may be such that individual representatives
have to make on-the-spot decisions about how to interpret the national position in as yet unanticipated contexts. Without a clear picture of what to maximise, maximisation becomes difficult and improvisation begins.To the extent that this is considered undesirable, efforts should be made to provide
Eurocrats with more, such as more detailed but above all smarter (clear yet
versatile) instructions and guidelines on what to aim for under various contingencies during the negotiation processes in and around EU meetings.
Second, the motivation structures of Eurocrats are more complex than
simply achieving their goals. Grand statements about representing the national interest do not hold sway in the complex realities of EU policy-making. The expert meeting participants have agreed that civil servants perceptions of their own aims and thus the criteria for judging whether they
perform effectively in their roles may be a matter of where one stands
with respect to the issues and policy domain at hand. Where one stands is,
as always, partly determined by where one sits in the larger fabric of the organisation: strategic departmental actors go for big pictures and are willing to make complex trade-offs; operational experts feel they succeed only
when European policies produce workable and helpful street-level practices.
Furthermore, the aims of Eurocrats are influenced by issue characteristics, e.g., concrete ones that are dealt with in discrete and reasonably speedy
processes versus complex ones that evolve gradually in fuzzy and drawn-out
processes. In the former instance, the predominant criterion for success
can and should be the extent to which Dutch preferences can be found in the
eventual EU outcomes (policies, standards, rules, time tables, budget allocations), as implied in chapter 3. However, actual success is much more difficult to assess, particularly in the short run. Several next-best criteria were
proposed during the expert meetings, ranging from simply getting ones
voice heard during meetings; being taken seriously by the Commission
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and/or other member-states in the relevant EU arenas; and, more ambitiously, controlling the (evolving) framing of the issues on the agenda of the
relevant EU arenas.
Finally, what can be aimed for is also determined by the strategic political
stakes involved. One distinction kept popping up. There are defensive
issues, where the strategic aim is to prevent EU policies from coming into
being that require changes to existing and valued Dutch ones. And there are
also offensive issues where the aim is to further the adoption of certain
EU measures seen as advantageous to Dutch interests. In both cases Dutch
Eurocrats have to engage in advocacy work, but clearly trying to block, delay
or modify something presupposes a different set of trade-offs and tactics
than trying to make something happen.
Eurocratic need to haves: Knowledge and expertise

What do civil servants who work intensively in the EU domain regard as
crucial professional competencies for operating on the European stage?
When asked about crucial competencies, interviewees came up with a list of
obvious but clearly pivotal items:
One should be able to operate in networks. People skills are important in this regard;
One should have a solid understanding of how the European arena
works: the formal as well as the informal rules of the European governance game;
One should speak at least one foreign language well but preferably
more.
One should be able to empathise with and read ones foreign counterparts, e.g., by being well informed about their various national systems, practices and policy priorities.
Surprisingly, in both the interviews and the expert meetings even the most
experienced Eurocrats play down the specific nature of the knowledge and
expertise required at the European level when compared to the national level. Of course, they say, there is some specific knowledge about European
governance structures and policy processes that people who work in or with
Brussels need to have, but acquiring this knowledge is considered to be no
big deal. Any capable civil servant should be able to learn most of this quickly. Likewise, language skills are sometimes mentioned as a great asset but,
significantly, a lack of multilingualism is not generally seen as debilitating
effective operating in the EU (particularly in the more formal decision are-
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nas). This observation is also borne out by the results of the survey, in which
respondents evaluated the facilities for training most positively among the
six statements on the organisational context of EU-related work.
Virtually all of the officials we observed and interviewed emphasised that
the real key lies in generic networking skills (sociability, empathy, reciprocity, reliability), and add that in this regard there are no fundamental differences between what is required in Europe and what is required in The
Hague and environs. They did note that not everyone possesses these
skills. All recounted instances of having worked in EU settings with Dutch
colleagues who clearly lacked some of these essential qualities and duly
created problems for themselves and for the Dutch position. These experiences were not very frequent, however, and in many cases a quiet word was
sent back via the appropriate channels to their superiors, encouraging them
to find replacements or get the individuals involved to lift their game.
These findings may of course be read in two different ways, depending
upon ones own vantage point and preconceptions. They can be taken as a
much-needed demystification of Eurocratic civil service work, breaking
through the conspiracy of insiders and calling into question the key role that
the Foreign Office tends to see for itself in the European domain. Yet they
can also be interpreted as evidence of the casual, off-handed, almost cavalier
approach that Dutch civil servants apparently take towards the role of training and skill development in enhancing their capability to operate effectively in European policy processes.
6.4 Eurocratic work: organisational preconditions

Our second major question in chapter 1 related to the organisational context
within which civil servants operate. We broke that question down into three
segments personnel policies, organisational structures and co-ordination
processes each of which entailed a number of more specific sub-themes
discussed below.
How big a part of the job?

Do civil servants feel they have sufficient time and opportunity to devote
themselves to the European dimension of their portfolio? As indicated
above, the survey showed that EU-related activities are either an integral
part of the activities in ones organisation and job or concentrated in a limited number of specialised officials within the department. In either case, the
question is not so much whether individual jobs allow sufficient time to be
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devoted to EU-related activities but whether EU-related activities are integrated into the departmental work in such a way that the organisation devotes sufficient attention to them. The correlation is evident: the various
officials who noted during interviews that they felt they should devote
more time to European issues and arenas tended to work in organisations
(or parts of organisations) where such activities did not enjoy a high priority.
Likewise, the survey findings reported in chapter 2 revealed a consistent
relationship between the degree of Europeanisation and the priority accorded to EU-related work in an organisation. Based on the three-fold distinction between Eurocratic bulwarks (highly Europeanised organisations),
Eurocratic runners-up (moderately Europeanised) and national champions (barely Europeanised), we found that the more highly Europeanised
an organisation was, the higher the priority accorded to EU-related work.
Moving from the empirical to the evaluational, an important question is
whether national champions devote too little attention to the EU. If so, it
would be tempting to label these organisations Eurocratic laggards (in
neat semantic contrast with the two other clusters of Eurocratic bulwarks
and Eurocratic runners-up), but this would be unfair. We ended up calling
them national champions to reflect the reality that these departments/
agencies tend to bear responsibility for policy portfolios that at present are
simply not Europeanised. Like any other organisation in Europe, public or
private, they too are bound by EU law in many and important aspects of
their operation. As such, they need to have a degree of awareness and skill in
dealing with the consequences of that reality. But to the extent that these organisations do not really have a core role in making or implementing EU
policy, their low degree of Europeanisation does not necessarily reflect a
parochial or backward attitude. It is simply a logical by-product of the institutional division of responsibilities and powers in their portfolio domains.
A solid career path?

To what extent are placements in Europe and posts that have a strong European component considered to be good career moves in Dutch departments and agencies? The survey revealed important differences in this regard between respondents in Eurocratic bulwarks on the one hand, and
respondents in less Europeanised organisations on the other. Civil servants
in Eurocratic bulwarks indicated much more frequently that experience
with EU-related activities offered an advantage for their career development
than civil servants in other types of organisations.
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Similar differences emerged between the departments we studied in the

two case studies. In the Ministry of Agriculture, which we included in the
case study on veterinary policy, having European experience is considered
to be good for ones career. This ministry distinguishes itself by an active
placement policy to place people with European experience in important
positions within the ministry. European experiences are therefore an integral part of ones career development, and the ministry actively seeks to integrate these experiences in its human resource management policies. At
the other end of the spectrum, in the Ministry of Health, which was included in the veterinary policy case study, and the Ministry of the Interior, which
was included in the police co-operation case, European experience is much
less valued in the career development of officials. In these departments it
was even felt that a spell at the EU-level could be an impediment to ones further career and that officials themselves actively had to search for a new position after having worked in Brussels and wanting to return to The Hague.
The same was true for officials working within the police organisation,
although several key police interviewees said there were clear signs of a
change there towards an upgrading of European/international job experiences.
Overall, the role of European experiences in the career development of
individual civil servants appears to be directly linked to the priority accorded
to EU affairs by the political and administrative leadership of a department
(see further below). But as the expert meetings revealed, even in highly Europeanised departments (EU bulwarks in chapter 2) factoring in European expertise and placements abroad into human resource management
in general and management development policies in particular prove to be
a tough nut to crack. Several key challenges were identified.
First there is the out of sight out of mind risk. Departments may lose
sight of the civil servants seconded to posts in Brussels and elsewhere. Not
so much in a policy sense departments are increasingly organising comeback sessions for all their staff placed abroad to compare notes, co-ordinate
policy positions and to convey departmental priorities but in a career planning sense. People lose track of how long someones secondment was and
how long they have already been away for. Directors looking to fill positions
will be more aware of people they see on a regular basis, and there are few
institutional mechanisms of reminding them that there are possible candidates for the job currently working abroad. The same goes vice versa, of
course. Many Eurocrats sent to Brussels (as an SNE or at the Permanent
Representation) get drawn into their new lives, acquire a taste for operating
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in the fast lanes of the EU and other foreign capitals, and may begin to bank
on sticking around. As a result, they may not be as proactive in maintaining the informal networks in their home ministries needed to keep their
careers afloat. As a result, the survey among SNEs that was reported on in
chapter 5 shows that more than one-third of all former Dutch SNEs no
longer work at the organisation that had originally sent them, while less
than 30% still regularly use the networks they had developed during their
stay in Brussels.
Secondly, there is a tendency to send out people who are too old, e.g., occupy relatively senior positions in the department. By definition, the number of jobs for them is smaller than for relatively junior staff, which makes
them more difficult to place back into the department upon their return
from abroad. The added complication is that at both lower and middle-management levels there is much less interdepartmental job mobility than at
the highest levels. Many peoples careers are focused within their own department. As a result of these factors, the average returnee from the EU circuit tends to fish in a relatively small pond. This being the case, each department has various cases of EU returnees who ended up stuck between a rock
and a hard place career-wise. Stories about these cases circulate around the
organisation, and provide a disincentive for others to go down the route of a
European placement.
Acting with a clear mandate?

How are policy priorities to be achieved at the European level developed and
communicated to the civil servants who operate in European arenas? What
degree of discretion are they given? In the survey, respondents were asked
whether they received a clear mandate when participating in EU-level meetings. Significantly, respondents in European bulwarks said they received
clearer mandates than respondents in other types of organisations.
These survey results offer a broad-stroked picture of the perceived clarity
of mandates among civil servants, but they hardly give an insight into the
dynamics of mandate formation in day-to-day EU-related work. These dynamics emerged more clearly in the two case studies, however. In both of
the case studies it was found that civil servants enjoyed a considerable degree of discretion in determining the Dutch position in European forums.
Several officials indicated that they wrote their own mandates and that interference from higher political and administrative levels was limited. The
backgrounds for this are somewhat different in the two cases. Veterinary
policy is part of a close-knit expert community in which officials have con-
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siderable leeway in determining their own priorities and positions. As a

result, officials experience only limited steering from the departments political and administrative leadership. In contrast, European police co-operation enjoys relatively low priority, particularly within the Ministry of the Interior. As a result, officials dealing with transborder policing, particularly
police officers in the field, have considerable discretion to formulate their
own positions and take their own initiatives. They were not particularly happy with this freedom, however, since they felt they lacked the strategic ministerial support needed to be effective at the EU-level. In the Ministry of Justice the degree of centralisation of EU policy formulation was considerably
higher, partly because of the ministers personal interest, and partly because that ministry occupies the head of delegation role in several crucial
European arenas in this policy domain.
To make sure all the bases are covered in the drawing up of instructions,
most departments have now begun working with broad-based dossier
teams on issues deemed important by their leaderships. These teams are
generally considered to be effective vehicles for exchanging information,
co-ordinating a single and balanced departmental position, and being effective in the interdepartmental arena, where ultimately the Dutch position
ought to be negotiated (various participants noted that the producing of the
latter can be an arduous task in the organised anarchy of Dutch horizontal
policy co-ordination). However, as with any solution to anything, it is not
without potential problems of its own. Two stand out: at any point in time,
one can have only so many of them, which raises the question of who decides on which grounds if an issue qualifies to be given this kind of systematic and sustained attention; and not each and every bundle of relevant expertise may be represented on the dossier teams (the often understaffed
and overworked legal divisions of departments being a case in point).
Are Eurocrats held accountable?

How do civil servants who operate in European arenas report about their activities to their back offices, and do these ascertain and evaluate their performance? We can be brief here, since the answer to this question is related
to the response to the question about instruction and guidance. Instruction
and feedback run in tandem: without clear instructions there is no clear
feedback mechanism. The main reason for this is that both are the result of
priorities and interest from the departmental leadership. We will turn to
this point next.
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Does top management care?

To what extent do the upper echelons of the organisation accord priority to
European issues, and to what extent do they get personally involved in European arenas if and when needed? The survey study showed that most civil
servants feel that European issues enjoy low to moderate priority in their organisations, although there were clearly distinctions between various clusters of organisations.
In the case studies, it became clearer that top management commitment
to EU affairs does vary greatly between departments. In the Ministry of
Agriculture, the EU is part of its daily work and is therefore an integral part
of the departments commitment and priorities. In the Ministry of Justice,
EU affairs have gained greater importance because of the current ministers commitment to them. Still, EU activities are less integrated into this
Ministrys day-to-day operations than in the Ministry of Agriculture. As a
consequence, commitment from top management is much more contingent upon the personal or political choices of the top management than of
organisational routines. In the Ministries of Health and the Interior, EU affairs have a relatively low priority. As a result, interest in and commitment to
EU issues by top management is limited.
Discussions in the expert groups confirmed the idea that differences in
top managements commitment to EU issues and activities can have significant consequences for Eurocratic work. Lack of commitment makes their
work more difficult. Interviewees indicate that (active) political support
from ones minister is crucial to get something done. This is true both at the
EU-level proper (e.g., when a minister is willing to make a phone call to a
colleague from another member-state in order to speed up decision-making or generate support for the Dutch position) and in relations with other
departments in the Netherlands. Lack of commitment leads to a peripheral
position for officials working on EU affairs within the department. This
again has two consequences. It means that EU activities are separated from
other, domestic activities in the department. The EU becomes an add-on to
the departments activities, rather than an integral part of it. It means that
European experiences hardly play a role in the departments policies toward
career development of individual civil servants (see also above).
It was also noted that management commitment is not just about management rhetoric these days, no sensible department leader will deny the
importance of the EU in the affairs of his organisation but about management also walking the talk in terms of its role in setting strategic priorities,
allocating its personal attention to EU dossiers when needed, demonstrat-
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ing by example, personal ambition and competence in the European domain, and creating proper incentives for staff to do the same.
Are Eurocrats well-resourced?

Do civil servants involved in European policy work find there is enough
funding and staff support from their organisations for them to be able to operate effectively? As noted earlier, the answer to this question depends to a
large degree on the way EU activities are integrated into a departments organisational routines. Where the EU is an integral part of a departments
day-to-day work, there is very little distinction between domestic and EU-related activities, and issues of funding and staff support become part of more
general debates about funding for specific government activities. Where
the EU is a more isolated element in a departments activities, funding and
staff support become more of an issue in themselves. The number of staff
dedicated to EU-related activities then becomes a direct result of the relative
importance accorded to EU issues by the departmental leadership. As stated above, the main problem then is not the low amount of funding and personnel available for EU-related tasks as such, but the lack of support for the
Eurocrats in these organisations from other parts and higher levels of the
organisation.
6.5 Grasping the real world of Eurocracy: The road ahead
This book has attempted to demonstrate the usefulness of studying European integration from the perspective of individual national civil servants
or national Eurocrats. They are the ones who make the EU happen and
whose activities shape EU policy-making on a daily basis. A lot of EU research and debate is squarely focused on big picture issues of integration
theory, but we believe that many developments in EU governance practices
can be observed most closely by zooming in on the activities of these civil
servants. By studying the way national Eurocrats operate within EU arenas
as well as their domestic organisational contexts, one can obtain a clearer focus on some of the major questions and dilemmas of European integration
and European governance: the impact of the EU on domestic governments
and policy-making; the day-to-day realities of two-level games and the tensions between the national and the European in EU governance; issues of
authority, control, co-ordination and accountability in an executive branch
facing a rapidly internationalising administrative and policy environment.
We have sought to show the promise and added value of this perspective,
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even if we have only been able to sketch some preliminary results of this
kind of research programme. We do believe this study makes three significant contributions to the literature on European integration and EU governance. First, our study unveils a range of basic empirical insights into the
extent and nature of Dutch national Eurocracy. We unveil and chart a Eurocratic world that until now has largely remained hidden. It provides a snapshot of the who, where and how much of the penetration of European issues
and arenas into the work of national policy bureaucrats that complements
similar attempts to look at the extent to which the need to implement EU
legislation and guidelines occupies national administrations (Knill 2001;
Mastenbroek 2007). Second, the study of Eurocratic practices has revealed
an important distinction between types of civil servants dealing with the
EU. The nature of Eurocratic work can be usefully understood in terms of
these three types of public servant profiles: bureaucrat-diplomats primarily working in highly formalised EU decision-making forums (and, incidentally the Eurocrats who are most likely to be actively engaged in the three
types of pre-proposal stage, Commission-focused tactics described in detail
in chapter 3); street-level entrepreneurs, primarily found in informal, taskrelated European policy networks; and those working in the back office of
The Hague departments, co-ordinating EU-related work within and across
organisations (departmental co-ordination bureaucrats). It may be useful
to expand that typology even further to also encompass the Brussels-based
national Eurocrats, e.g., SNEs as well as those seconded to the Permanent
Representation, although it is not immediately evident that they share
much beyond their physical location at the heart of the EU polity. Clearly
SNEs have to engage in a subtle balancing act that officials at the Permanent
Representation do not. But they do share the fact that they have to survive
in the Brussels milieu on a full-time instead of a yo-yoing (Thedvall 2006)
basis.
The distinction between these types of civil servants runs through almost
all aspects of individual EU-related activities. As we have seen, it is relevant
for their role orientations, for their daily activities and contact patterns, for
the arenas in and channels through which they are active, for the formal and
informal rules of the game they have to cope with, and for the measures of
quality and effectiveness they apply. Distinguishing between types of Eurocrats is therefore crucial for understanding what kind of activities take place
and why these activities are done the way they are. Moreover, this typology of
civil servants highlights some key challenges in organising EU-related
work within Dutch government. The Dutch input in EU policy-making is
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formed by the combined efforts of all types of officials. More often than not,
their respective activities focus on related concerns and have an impact on
each other. At the same time, these types of civil servants have distinct outlooks on the EU and on the way EU-related work should be handled, making
it highly likely that there will be both clashes and a lack of co-ordination.
Hence, effectively organising EU-related activities largely consists of co-ordinating and accommodating these various activities so as to minimise
overlap and tensions, and increase possible synergies.
Our third major finding that lends itself to further exploration in crossnational comparative studies pertains to the organisational context of Eurocratic work. The overriding differences found in our study relate to the degree of Europeanisation that public organisations display. The more highly
Europeanised an organisation is, the higher the priority accorded to EU-related work, the better EU-related work is for ones career, and the better this
work is organisationally facilitated. We called this the virtuous circle of organisational Europeanisation, whereby greater degrees of Europeanisation
lead to better organisational facilitation which may in turn be expected to
strengthen EU-related work in the organisation again. This conclusion pinpoints key determinants of what one might call organisational EU competence: the degree to which EU-related issues and arenas are seen by top
management to affect the organisations core portfolios, and the degree to
which this contributes to ensuring that the special requirements of facilitating Eurocratic work in terms of personnel policies, organisational structures and co-ordination routines are met.
If this hypothesis is able to withstand more rigorous scrutiny in crosssectoral and cross-national empirical research, it has practical implications
for efforts to improve the way EU-related work is organised and facilitated
within national bureaucracies. The challenge from the top down becomes
how to get the organisation to pass the critical threshold that separates the
Eurocratic bulwarks from their counterparts where Eurocratic work leads
a more marginal existence. When should the few remaining national
champions prepare themselves to join the ranks of the Eurocratic runnersup and thus start to invest more heavily in freeing up and enabling their
members to become more active in European arenas? This is not an easy
call. Ten years ago, when the speed of the integration process was high, it
seemed there was an EU domino effect of sorts on the rise. It seemed only
a matter of time before each and every hitherto national policy domain
would be Europeanised. Not preparing for that onslaught would have been
bad management. Nowadays, the pace has decreased, and the imperative to
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shape up is perhaps somewhat less compelling. However, looking back at

the long-term dynamics of European integration suggests that the process
has always gone in spurts interrupted by impasses. We are now clearly at
such an impasse, but if history is anything to go by in preparing for the future, the lesson here is that sooner or later there will be a further deepening
of the European Union. National departments and agencies currently not
yet in the European front line would do well to anticipate this and continue
to invest in capacity-building.
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APPENDIX
ITEMS ON EUROPEANSATION INCLUDED IN THE
POMO SURVEY
PART H IMPACT OF THE EUROPEAN UNION
In your work you may be affected by the European Union (EU). For instance, you may be
involved in preparing the Dutch input into EU decision-making, you may be participating
in meetings at the EU level or bilateral meetings with colleagues from other member
states, or you may play a role in implementing European legislation and policies. Some of
these activities are listed in what follows.
1. Is your work affected by the European Union?
Yes
No, go to question XXX.
2. Can you indicate the importance of the following activities in your work?
Totally
Not very
Fairly
Very
unimportant important Neutral important important
1. Preparation of the Dutch input
into EU-level meetings
2. Participation in working groups
of the Council of Ministers
3. Participation in meetings organised
by the European Commission
(e.g. expert meetings, comitology)
4. Consultation with colleagues from
one or more other member states
outside the formal EU framework.
5. Transposition of European policies
into national legal measures
6. Practical application or enforcement of rules and policies that
originated in the EU
7. Taking into account EU policies
during national policy-making
8. Involving local government
in EU-level decision-making or
policy-making
appendix
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3. On average, how many hours per week do you spend on the EU-related activities listed above?
hours per week (go to question XXX if you spend 0 hours per week on EUrelated activities).
4. The following statements concern how your employer facilitates EU-related activities
organisationally. This may involve training opportunities, career development or managerial support. To what extent do you agree with the following statements?
I do not I do
I
Dont
I totally know/not
agree not
at all agree Neutral agree agree applicable
1. My organisation offers sufficient
training opportunities for EU-related
activities
2. When selecting candidates for
EU-related activities, my employer
sufficiently takes my European
experience into account
3. Gaining experience in EU-related
activities offers an advantage for my
career
4. When I participate in EU-level
meetings, I receive a clear negotiation
mandate
5. In my organisation, EU-related
activities have a lower priority than
purely national activities
6. In my policy area there is sufficient
co-ordination between those who
negotiate at the EU-level about European policies, and those responsible
for transposing and implementing
those policies
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NOTES
notes chapter 1
1
We chose the Netherlands for purely pragmatic reasons because the

authors lived there, and there was interest among Dutch officials in a
study of their own Eurocratic practices. We have no reason to assume
that the Dutch case is in any way a crucial case of national Eurocratic
practices. If anything, evidence from similar studies in other countries
suggest that there are many common features (see, e.g., SBOV 2004;
Thedvall 2006).
Over the past number of years, a plethora of studies and governmental
reports have analysed formal co-ordination mechanisms and procedures in Dutch government (Soetendorp and Andeweg 2001; de
Zwaan 2005; Gemengde Commissie Sturing EU-Aangelegenheden
2005; Raad van State 2005; Raad voor het Openbaar Bestuur 2004;
Hanf and Soetendorp 1998). These studies and reports all focus on the
co-ordination process that leads to the formulation of an official Dutch
position in EU decision-making processes. We do not aim to contribute to this debate. By contrast, our study looks at co-ordination and
management in daily work practices, quite apart from the formal
stages of EU decision-making.
notes chapter 2
3
Because Norway is not an EU member, Egeberg and Trondal (1999)

asked questions regarding both the EU and the EEA (European Economic Area) Agreement, because the EEA Agreement forms the primary legal link between Norway and the EU proper.
Four respondents indicated numbers of hours spent on EU-related activities that exceeded 40 hours, with one respondent responding with
a total of 82 hours. Since we can assume these higher figures reflect a
notes
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(nearly) full working week, these respondents have been added to the
40 hour category. This does not substantially affect the figures for this
category.
5 For a few respondents, the EU-related time allotment exceeds 100%.
This may be due to the fact that they regularly work overtime, or that
they have more than one job (since the contractual working time is calculated on the basis of the respondents primary job).
6 Principal Component Analysis is closely related to factor analysis but
uses a different statistical method to extract the factors/components.
7 The analysis was carried out on the original five answer categories for
each specific activity. The factors were extracted using Principal Component Analysis. Factor rotation was carried out using direct oblimin,
because all activities are correlated to some extent. Factors were extracted if their own values were greater than 1.0. Tests for multicollinearity
and sample size adequacy all scored well above minimally required values.
8 For the sake of clarity, Table 7 uses the dichotomous variables of Table 5
again.
9 The dispersion index is calculated as 1 / (n * vi2), in which vi is the share
of the i-th respondent in the total amount of time spent on EU-related
work in an organisation, and n is the total number of respondents in
that organisation. This formula is based on the formula for calculating
the effective number of parties in a parliament or election (see Laakso
and Taagepera 1979). The effective number of parties is used as a measure to account not only for the actual number of parties but also their relative size. For instance, if there are three parties, where one has 50% of
the votes and the other two each have 25%, the effective number of parties will be 2.67. This number reflects the fact that the party system contains three parties but in practice also resembles a two-party system. We
can use the same formula to calculate the effective number of civil servants working on EU-related activities in an organisation, based on the
amount of time spent by each civil servant as a portion of the time spent
on EU-related activities by all civil servants together in that organisation. By dividing the effective number by the total number of civil servants in that organisation, we obtain a figure of between 0 and 1.
10 This is the reason why we have restricted the calculation of the dispersion index to those respondents whose work is affected by the EU. If the
dispersion index is calculated for all respondents (thus including respondents whose work is not affected by the EU), the dispersion index
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12
13
14
15
16
17
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is no longer independent of the overall level of EU involvement in an organisation.

The category Hoog College van Staat includes, among others, the
Dutch Council of State and support staff in Parliament.
Since the dispersion for this category is based on a very small number
of civil servants, it cannot be compared very easily with other organisations in this table. Therefore, we have put the dispersion index in
brackets.
The Ministry of General Affairs is the Prime Ministers Office.
Since the dispersion index for the Ministry of General Affairs is based
on just two civil servants involved in EU-related work (each spending
one hour per week on the EU), this figure cannot be compared well to
those of other organisations in the table. Therefore, we have put it in
brackets.
It should be noted that the Ministry of Justice in our survey also included support staff in the courts system. This may have suppressed the level of EU involvement we found, since the relative number of civil servants involved in EU-related work may be higher at the policy
department in The Hague than in the courts. Unfortunately, the survey
data do not allow us to make this distinction.
Correlations have been calculated using the time share of each respondent, that is, the number of hours spent on EU-related activities as a
percentage of contractual working time.
Since respondents from the Tax Service comprise a large portion of the
respondents in the moderate category, we re-ran the analysis without
the tax department. This reduced the differences between the moderate group and the others somewhat, but it did not reverse the order of
these groups.
notes chapter 3
18 We do not discuss a potential third stream of uploading studies here.
The burgeoning literature on networked governance, new modes of
governance, or democratic experimentalism (Jordan and Schout
2006; Citi and Rhodes 2007; Sabel and Zeitlin 2007) examines the
problems of co-ordination associated with managing the networks
within policy areas emerging under the Open Method of Coordination.
The achievement of any of the four key elements of the OMC fixing
guidelines and timetables, establishment of indicators and benchmarks, translation of these into European guidelines and their imple-
notes
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19
20
21
22
23
24
25
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mentation at national and regional levels, and the periodic monitoring,

evaluation and peer review of policies (Lisbon Presidency Council Conclusions, European Council 2000) may qualify as a form of uploading uploading by consent but its discussion is beyond the focus of
this chapter.
However, the question of how powerful the Commission is vis--vis the
Council and European Parliament during the co-decision game is rife
with debate. Whereas some argue that the Commission has become
virtually toothless since the introduction of co-decision II (Tsebelis and
Garrett 2000, 2001; Crombez 2001) others argue that conditions can
emerge under which the Commission can play a substantial role
(Scharpf 1999; Peterson 2002; Burns 2004; Schmidt 2000).
Writing on the situation before the Maastricht Treaty, i.e., before the introduction of the co-decision I procedure, Hull (1993) even argued that
80% of the text of Commission proposals survived the final stage of
Council decision-making.
The section dealing with animal diseases and welfare within this ministry amounted to only 3.5 full-time employees who were influential at
the time we conducted our interviews.
The Office International des Epizooties (OIE) is an intergovernmental
organisation created by the International Agreement of 25 January
1924. In 1924, only 28 nations were members, currently there are over
160 members.
Group interviews with Eurocrats in focus groups corroborated the
existence of these strategies. We can be fairly certain that frontloading,
signalling and coalition-building strategies are common practices
across a range of Europeanised ministries in the Dutch central government.
The Dutch Louise Fresco was FAOs Agricultural Departments Assistant Director General until 1 June 2006.
The informal circuit is, in any case, underexploited by Dutch civil servants. Brussels is too close to The Hague to stay overnight. Evening
programmes, such as drinks and dinners, and meetings with fellow
par-ticipants over breakfast at hotels, are generally missed by Dutch
civil servants.
notes chapter 5
26 The authors would like to thank Jarle Trondal for sharing his work and
his questionnaires with us.
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27 CLENAD UK Section (2002) An Unofficial Guide for UK National Experts, 3rd edition, p. 44-45.
28 One of the respondents had been seconded before this period but was
included in the dataset to maximise the number of observations.
29 The survey was sent by e-mail, but the respondents were given a choice
of returning the completed document electronically or by post.
30 It only became clear when data were gathered that two of the respondents had been detached prior to 2000. They have also been also included in the analyses given the value of empirical data.
31 The cross-time comparisons should also be read with caution, however, since the responses to survey questions with regard to the secondment period of former SNEs rely on their memory. An inevitable problem connected with research that relies on respondents memories is
the potential inaccuracy of the respondents input.
32 The statistical figures concerning the Commission staff in this article
are based on the European Commission Statistical Bulletin of Commission Staff 04/2006, the period of which corresponds to our data collection period.
33 Commission Decision C(2004) 577 of 27 February 2004 laying down rules
on the secondment of National Experts to the Commission, Article 2.
34 CLENAD Nederlandse Sectie (2003), Op naar een win3 situatie: Een
overzicht voor de versterking van de banden tussen gedetacheerde medewerkers bij de Europese instelling en de overheid in Den Haag, Brussels, p. 3.
35 Commission Decision C(2004) 577 of 27 February 2004 laying down rules
on the secondment of National Experts to the Commission, p. 2.
36 Interview with SNE31, Brussels, Feb. 2006.
37 Caroline de Gruyter, 17-18 Jan. 2004, NRC Handelsblad, Banenjagen
voor het Vaderland, p. 39.
38 Interview with SNE23, Brussels, Feb. 2006.
39 Interview with SNE84, The Hague, March 2006
40 Interview with SNE25, Brussels, Jan. 2006.
41 We adopted the same division as used by Liesbet Hooghe (2001) in The
European Commission and the Integration of Europe to classify Commission Directorate-Generals according to policy areas.
42 We borrow Van der Meer and Raadschelderss classification (1999,
205-228), The Senior Civil Service in the Netherlands: A Quest for
Unity, in Page and Wright (1999), Bureaucratic Elites in Western European States.
43 Interestingly, this observation is in direct contrast to the findings in
notes
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45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
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chapter 2, where we stated that higher ranks seem to be associated

with higher levels of EU involvement. One potential explanation for
the divergent observation in the POMO survey is the clustering of all income levels above 5000 euro gross monthly into a single category, preventing the recording of variations between the seven different ranks
that may fall into this one category.
Including one former SNE who had been seconded for five years.
We omitted the category Colleagues within your DG for the basic reason that this category would be superfluous since all Commission officials have daily contacts with their colleagues.
The subcategories for Commission officials were omitted for the current contacts of former SNEs to enable a general overview of contacts
with the Commission.
It is difficult, however, to conclude whether these exceptions are due to
a real change in contact intensity or whether this divergence is merely a
result of lower accuracy in the responses for which there is a reliance on
the officials memories.
Programma Andere Overheid, Rijksbrede takenanalyse, 2005, Gemengde Commissie Sturing EU-aangelegenheden Eindrapport, The
Hague, p. 12-13.
Gerben Everts quoted in Den Haag kijkt teveel naar Den Haag, PM 19/1,
2005, p. 27.
Interview with SNE79, The Hague, March 2006.
Interview with SNE20, Brussels, Feb. 2006.
Interview with SNE18, Brussels, March 2006.
Interview with SNE25, Brussels, Jan. 2006.
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68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
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This is not to say that the returning SNEs, as individuals, do not benefit
from their experiences and networks, but the crucial point here is that
the gains for the seconding organisation are limited if the SNEs leave
the organisation upon their return home from their assignments at the
Commission.
Interview with SNE84, Rotterdam, March 2006.
The categories for answering this question were to a large degree, to a
reasonable degree, to a limited degree, no, and rather the opposite,
which were dichotomised into Yes (the first 3 categories) and No (the
latter 2 categories).
CLENAD (2003), Report of the Working Group Life after SNE?.
notes
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ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Karin Geuijen is a postdoctoral fellow at the Faculty of Organisation, Culture and Management of the VU University, Amsterdam, and teaches
public administration at the Utrecht School of Governance, Utrecht University
Paul t Hart is professor of Political Science at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, and professor of Public
Administration at the Utrecht School of Governance, Utrecht University
Sebastiaan Princen is assistent professor of Public Administration at the
Utrecht School of Governance, Utrecht University
Kutsal Yesilkagit is assistent professor of Public Administration at the
Utrecht School of Governance, Utrecht University
Co-authors of individual chapters

Caspar van den Berg is research associate at the Department of Public
Administration, Leiden University (chapter 5)
Ellen Mastenbroek is assistent professor of Public Administration at Radboud University Nijmegen (chapter 2)
Until late 2007, Semin Suvarierol was a research associate at the Utrecht
School of Governance. She has since joined Andersson Elffers Felix
(Utrecht) as a junior consultant (chapter 5)
about the authors
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INDEX
Activity and contact pattern 24, 100,

131, 133, 147.
Agency 19, 31, 64, 68, 83, 93, 112,
138.
Agencies 18-20, 26, 28, 31, 34, 57,
109, 110, 112, 121, 130, 132, 141, 149.
Allegiance 82, 86, 101, 105, 107, 133.
Arena 21, 22, 24, 28, 29, 51, 52, 54,
57, 72, 77-79, 81, 83, 85, 87, 90,
99-101, 104, 116, 129, 131, 134-137,
139, 141, 143-148.
Back office 77, 87, 90, 95, 131, 132,
134, 137, 144, 147.
Bureaucrat-diplomat 28, 87, 89,
93, 94, 98-102, 131, 133-135, 137,
147.
Bureaucratic politics 91, 131, 132.
Career 16, 21, 22, 31, 32, 46-48, 63,
64, 104, 105, 111, 113, 123-125, 127,
141-143, 148.
Career development 24, 29,
112, 141, 142, 145.
Case study 14, 25, 27, 28, 130, 133,
134, 142, 143, 145.
Coalition 28, 59, 72-74, 86, 89, 99,
101, 116, 135, 136.
Coalition formation 28, 58, 70,
72-74, 78.
Co-decision procedure 135.

Comitology 52.
Comitology committee 13, 20, 137.
Commission expert group 13, 32, 135.
Committee 13, 14, 19-21, 28, 52-54,
56, 59, 68, 70-74, 79, 81, 85-87, 89,
90, 92, 95, 96, 98-101, 133, 135, 137.
Competencies 24, 139.
Co-ordination 13, 14, 17, 21, 24, 28,
32, 46-48, 52-55, 62, 64, 66, 71, 72,
74, 81, 89, 91, 92, 94, 97, 99-102,
109, 120, 131, 132, 134, 136, 137, 140,
142, 144, 146-148.
Co-ordination bureaucrat 90,
100, 101, 134, 147.
Policy co-ordination 17, 57, 90,
144.
Council of Ministers 14, 54, 79, 81.
Council Working Party (and group)
13, 20, 32, 38-41, 71, 74, 80, 135.
Deliberation 74, 78.
Departmental co-ordinator 28, 29,
90, 99-102, 134, 147.
Dilemma 5, 16, 21, 23, 68, 86, 146.
Diplomacy 15-17, 19, 22, 23, 84, 129,
130.
Classic model 15-19, 21.
New model 15, 17-19, 21, 22.
index
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Directorates-General (DGs) 51, 59,

62, 63, 66, 67, 69, 108, 109, 115,
118, 120.
Discretion 22, 85, 90, 91, 136, 137,
143, 144, 158.
Dispersion index (see also Organisational embeddedness) 42-44.
Dossier team 144.
Dutch Permanent Representation
26, 57, 77, 78, 80, 100, 109, 115, 116,
118.
Enlargement 72, 108, 135.
EU institution 14, 20, 26, 28, 54, 88,
89, 93, 97, 100, 103, 109, 115, 116,
123, 131, 134.
Eurocrat 13, 14, 23, 27, 28, 32, 33, 36,
51, 52, 59-62, 72, 74, 77, 78, 85-87,
92-94, 97, 99-102, 130, 131, 133,
135, 136, 138, 139, 142, 144, 146,
147.
Eurocratic bulwark 42, 44, 45, 47-49,
111, 125, 141, 148.
Eurocratic runner(s)-up 43, 45, 47,
48, 111, 141.
European Commission 13, 14, 20, 25,
26, 28, 29, 32, 38-41, 51-74, 77, 81,
86, 89, 93, 95-97, 99-109, 112-114,
116-122, 124-126, 132, 135, 136, 138,
147.
European governance 13, 14, 16, 23,
26, 29, 77, 85, 99, 103, 106, 113, 125,
139, 146, 147.
European integration 13, 129, 132,
146, 147, 149.
European Parliament (EP) 26, 54,
67, 68, 73, 74, 89, 100.
Europeanisation 26, 28, 31, 37, 39,
44-46, 48, 49, 51, 54, 58, 74, 85, 111,
130, 131, 133, 141, 142, 148.
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Organisational Europeanisation
48, 148.
Expert 15, 17, 51, 56, 57, 59, 70, 84,
86, 93, 100, 105-107, 111, 113, 126,
127, 133, 137, 138.
Expert committee 20, 56, 72,
73, 70, 133, 137.
Expert community 85, 143.
Expert group 13, 20, 21, 32, 56,
73, 135, 138, 145.
Expert meeting 25, 27, 88, 130,
135, 136, 138, 139, 142.
Expertise 15-17, 21, 22, 24, 56, 60, 62,
63, 75, 85, 100, 105, 106, 109, 113,
118, 121, 126, 127, 131, 132, 139, 142,
144.
Feedback 52, 144.
First pillar 26, 28, 53, 78, 86, 95, 99,
133, 135, 136.
Frontloading 28, 58, 59, 62, 73, 74,
78, 104, 116, 118, 119, 126.
High-level meeting 89, 135.
Home government/organisation
103, 104, 107, 111, 112, 114, 117, 120,
121, 125, 126.
Ideal type 19, 94, 100, 131, 132.
Implementation (see also transposition) 13, 14, 20, 26, 32, 34, 35, 3840, 46, 51, 52, 55, 58, 62, 67, 68, 79,
83, 96, 113, 117, 132, 134-136, 147.
Informal network 135, 136, 143.
Information 13, 16, 19, 24, 29, 56, 5861, 68, 72, 78, 79, 83-85, 90, 94, 95,
98, 100, 102, 104, 108, 113, 114, 116118, 122, 126, 135, 144.
Instruction 22, 24, 64, 74, 90, 91,
97, 107, 118, 138, 144.
Intergovernmental 86.
International 13, 15-17, 19, 21-23, 26,
THE NEW EUROCRATS
29-02-2008
11:09
Pagina 175
57, 64, 66, 77, 83, 87-92, 96-98,

101, 106, 113, 125, 129, 132, 133, 137,
142.
International organisation 21,
64-66, 106, 114-116, 129.
Know-how 89, 100, 104, 113.
Know-who 104, 113.
Leadership 93, 142, 144, 146.
Mandate 22, 32, 46-48, 97, 119,
143.
MEP 89, 135.
Ministry of Agriculture 28, 42-44,
57, 60-68, 71, 110, 111, 118, 125, 142,
145.
Ministry of Foreign Affairs 16, 17,
19-23, 34, 42-44, 110, 111.
Ministry of Health 43, 44, 88, 91,
110, 142, 145.
Ministry of Justice 27, 43, 44, 78, 79,
81, 83, 87, 88, 91, 92, 110, 144, 145.
Ministry of the Interior 25, 27, 31, 43,
44, 78, 79, 82, 88, 91, 92, 142, 144,
145.
Multilateral 16, 17. 57, 89,
Multilateral diplomacy 18, 129.
Multilateral forums 17, 19, 89,
100, 101.
Multilateral network links 113.
Multinational 84, 86, 87, 107.
National administration 14, 22, 63,
102, 103, 106, 107, 115-117, 119, 120,
122, 126, 147.
National bureaucracy 23, 81, 148.
National champion 44, 45, 47, 48,
141, 148.
National interest 21, 51, 86, 90, 116,
138.
National parliamentarian 135.
National position 14, 28, 52-54, 75,
87, 90, 99, 100, 118, 120, 132, 138.

Network(s) 13, 15, 22, 29, 53, 62, 65,
66, 77, 78, 85, 87, 95-100, 104, 105,
112-114, 116, 117, 119-123, 125-127,
133, 135, 136, 139, 143, 147.
Networking 100, 113, 116, 136.
Networking skill 73, 140.
New diplomats 23, 86, 99, 130.
Organisational embeddedness (see
also dispersion index) 29, 32, 101.
Permanent Representation 26, 57,
59-62, 65, 74, 77, 78, 80-82, 89, 95,
100, 106, 109, 115, 116, 118, 134, 142,
147.
Police co-operation 25, 26, 28, 77-79,
82, 83, 85, 87, 94, 96, 97, 99, 101,
102, 133-135, 142, 144.
Policy network 78, 99, 113, 114, 125,
133, 147.
Policy sector 26, 32, 54, 55, 113, 115,
116.
Political position 87.
Post-national 86, 87, 93, 97, 101.
Preparation (for EU meetings) 79,
88-90, 100.
Pre-proposal phase 52-54, 58, 59, 73,
74.
Professional(s) 15, 17, 19, 23, 33, 63,
69, 83, 87, 88, 93, 96, 97, 98, 100,
103, 106, 121, 122, 126, 132, 133, 135,
136, 139.
Professionalism 18, 131, 132.
Rank 20, 26, 27, 74, 83, 92, 107, 111,
112, 123, 124.
Rationale 85.
Research methods 14, 27, 129.
Role orientation 24, 54, 78, 93, 95,
100, 131, 133, 147.
Rule 24, 69, 78, 84, 85, 91, 94, 95,
index
175
THE NEW EUROCRATS
29-02-2008
11:09
Pagina 176
100-102, 107, 131, 132, 135-139, 147.

Rules of thumb 78, 88.
Seconded National Expert (SNE) 25,
26, 29, 58, 59, 62, 63, 64, 66, 67,
68, 69, 70, 74, 103-127, 142, 143,
147.
Secondment 29, 63, 64, 69, 70, 74,
103-107, 109, 111-116, 118, 120-127,
142.
Sector 25, 55, 63, 67, 68, 99, 106,
107, 115, 116, 124, 125.
Signalling 28, 58-62, 66, 73-75, 78,
104, 116, 117, 120, 126.
Strategic behaviour 28, 51, 54, 57, 58,
73, 99, 116, 118.
Strategy 28, 53-59, 62, 65, 70, 73, 74,
97, 98, 109, 117, 119, 135.
Street-level entrepreneur 28, 92, 97,
99, 100-102, 132-135, 147.
Subnational government 130.
Supranational 19, 26, 29, 53, 54, 63,
65, 74, 94, 103, 104, 116, 126, 133.
Survey 14, 20, 25, 27, 31-33, 35, 42,
44-46, 48, 49, 105, 106, 111, 114,
125, 130, 134, 140, 141, 143, 145.
176
the new eurocrats
Questions asked in 25, 31, 32,

105, 106, 114.
Sample and response rate 25,
32, 105, 106.
Technocratic 78.
Temporary employment/staff 106.
Third pillar 26, 77, 78, 81, 86, 94, 95,
97-99, 135, 136.
Top management 100, 145, 148.
Transnational 28, 29, 77-79, 83, 84,
87, 97, 99, 100, 113, 114, 116, 126,
132.
Transposition (see also implementation) 32, 38-41, 52, 134.
Two-level game 146.
Uploading 28, 52-55, 57, 58, 62, 73,
74.
Veterinary 25, 26, 28, 51, 57, 58, 65,
69, 71, 72, 77, 78, 99, 101, 118, 133,
135, 136, 142, 143.
Virtuous circle/spiral (of organisational Europeanisation) 48, 49, 148.
Working group 14, 19-21, 28, 38-41,
53, 54, 64, 71, 74, 80, 81, 84, 86, 8892, 95, 99, 100, 135.

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PolIcIEs in the European Union are largely made

This book addresses a range of questions that are pertinent to this

The New Eurocrats

These questions are answered through a wide variety of sources

GEUIJEN // T HART // PRINCEN // YESILKAGIT

by national civil servants who prepare, take and implement

The New Eurocrats

National Civil Servants in EU Policy-making

KARIN GEUIJEN // PAUL T HART // SEBASTIAAN PRINCEN // KUTSAL YESILKAGIT

ISBN 978 90 5356 797 5

amst erdam uni versi t y press

THE NEW EUROCRATS

The New Eurocrats:

THE NEW EUROCRATS

THE NEW EUROCRATS

The New Eurocrats

Amsterdam University Press

THE NEW EUROCRATS

Cover design: Maedium, Utrecht

THE NEW EUROCRATS

Tables and Figures 8

Emerging Eurocracy: National civil servants and European

Surveying the Dutch civil service 31

THE NEW EUROCRATS

Representing the national interest in Brussels 51

Eurocratic work in the Third Pillar: A different world? 77

Living and breathing the Brussels bureaucracy 103

THE NEW EUROCRATS

Dutch Eurocracy revisited 129

THE NEW EUROCRATS

TABLES AND FIGURES

Two models of diplomatic representation

EU involvement among civil servants

Dutch Eurocrats: Three ideal types

Commission Directorate-Generals as SNE Receivers

THE NEW EUROCRATS

SNE return rate after secondment

Table 6.1 Strengths and weaknesses of Eurocratic ideal types

THE NEW EUROCRATS

THE NEW EUROCRATS

THE NEW EUROCRATS

the new eurocrats

THE NEW EUROCRATS

STUDYING EUROCRATS AT WORK

THE NEW EUROCRATS

The central concern of these studies is how the domestic administrations of

the new eurocrats

THE NEW EUROCRATS

1.2 From diplomats to international experts

studying eurocrats at work

THE NEW EUROCRATS

Two models of international representation

the new eurocrats

THE NEW EUROCRATS

studying eurocrats at work

THE NEW EUROCRATS

In terms of underlying assumptions, the new model of diplomacy also

Bilateral and multilateral

Nature of the state

Single unit with

Table 1.1 Two models of diplomatic representation

the new eurocrats

THE NEW EUROCRATS